


alone amidst the ruins

by bereft_of_frogs



Series: the nine in the tree [6]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Apocalypse, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Gen, Magic, Mythology References, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:21:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 69,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24895339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bereft_of_frogs/pseuds/bereft_of_frogs
Summary: Everything falls apart quickly now.The battle against Thanos approaches its final conclusion and the universe begins to fall apart.AnEndgameAU.
Relationships: Brunnhilde | Valkyrie & Loki (Marvel), Loki & Thor (Marvel), Steve Rogers & Thor
Series: the nine in the tree [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1260689
Comments: 184
Kudos: 271





	1. Prologue: Things Fall Apart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanos seizes what’s his. Forces gather to try and stop him - but they’re all running out of time.

_“He knew that all the hazards and perils were now drawing together to a point: the next day would be a day of doom, the day of final effort or disaster, the last gasp.”_

_\- JRR Tolkien, The Return of the King_

Everything falls apart quickly now.

There are black ring ships in the sky above New York, and then they vanish, leaving behind a string of destruction down Bleaker Street. No one knows where Tony Stark went. He has not been seen since the ships appeared in the sky.

They learn this from Rhodes, who had been the one to make the call. He found the phone in the wreckage and decided enough was enough.

“What about Strange?” Bruce asks.

“Nothing,” Rhodes says. His voice is tinny and distant. The connection isn’t good. “I’ve got someone called Wong here, he says Strange was headed in the ships direction.”

“With the Stone?” Loki asks quietly.

“What?” Rhodes calls through the phone. “I can’t hear you.”

“We can only assume he had it on him.”

“That’s five.” Loki’s face is very, very pale.

“Listen, we’re going to go help survivors. We’ll come to you as soon as we can. Just-” The connection drops. Steve picks up the phone and clicks it shut.

“So. Thanos has the fifth Stone,” T’Challa says.

“It appears that way,” Loki says. “He will be on his way here. Directly here, for the final piece of his puzzle.”

“How much longer do you need?”

“I don’t know.” Jane shakes her head. “It’s going slower than we hoped. Shuri’s reprogramming fast but…”

“Work as quickly as you can.” T’Challa stands and starts out of the room. “I will get our forces ready to stand against him.”

“We’re not going to stand a chance,” Loki says.

“We’re going to try,” Steve says, a perilous determination in his voice.

Far, far away, Thanos sits on a silent Titan, waiting for the final Stone to arrive. It could not be removed from the sorcerer’s possession, Ebony Maw reported, but Thanos is not worried. He will not be stopped, not when he is so close to his goal.

Little does he know, there’s a mutiny occurring on his ship. They picked up more passengers on Earth than he was aware of, and a reckless band of outlaws now captained by Rocket Raccoon slip aboard the ship. They find Tony Stark arguing with his teenaged protege, both stowaways.

They free Strange and hide away in the bowels of the ship, hatching a plot. The closer they get to Titan the more they’re sure their plan just might work.

(It won’t.)

Shuri and Bruce work around the clock trying to disentangle the Mind Stone from the core of Vision’s being, while Wanda watches anxiously. Eventually they are joined by Jane and even Loki, who sets aside his revulsion towards the Stone. Meanwhile, T’Challa assembles all the armies he can to mount a defense, and supplies two old soldiers with new equipment.

“How bad are these odds?” Bucky asks Steve as he flexes the new prosthetic.

Steve sighs. “They’re not great.”

“They’ve never really been great, have they?” Bucky offers a tired smile. “But we’ve made it this far.” They turn back towards the field, where the Wakandan soldiers are waiting. “I think the goats are going to miss me.”

Steve laughs. “They really took to you.”

“They liked you too. When this is all over, you should come visit again. There will be babies in the spring.”

“Cute. Sam will like that.”

For a quiet few minutes, they exist in the dream that they are going to get out of this alive.

“We need more time!” Shuri cries, after another failed attempt at finding a faster method of reprogramming the synapses. “If I can just have another day.”

“You can’t,” Loki says. “I am sorry. We are out of time.”

“Wanda.” Vision grabs her hand. She looks down at him, shaking her head desperately. “What we talked about-”

“No.”

“We’re _out of time_ ,” Loki says again. He’s sure of it. There’s a screaming in the back of his mind, a reverberation of warning.

The countertops shake with the vibrations of the approaching ships.

“We’ve got to-”

“I won’t give up,” Shuri says. “I’ll try, maybe if we work faster.”

“I have to go,” Bruce says. “I have to help. The Hulk-”

“Go,” Jane nudges him out of the way. “I’ve been watching for days, I can help her. The two of you get out there and buy us as much time as you can.”

They start out of the lab but in the hall, Loki has to stop, bracing himself on the wall so he can take a deep breath.

“Hey,” Bruce says. “We’ve got this.”

Loki offers a wan smile. “Thank you. I cannot pretend to hope for myself but…if we can buy enough time…”

“We just need enough time to be able to destroy the Stone, or for Thor to return with his new axe. We just need to stall enough to stand a chance.”

Loki nods.

They join the others at the head of the army.

Steve has a new shield, long and rectangular. Bucky has a new arm and Wakandan-designed ranged weapons. Sam has his repaired flight suit. Rhodes joined them from America a few hours before, in a specially designed suit. Natasha looks coldly determined. Loki and Bruce appear next to her.

“This is the end of Wakanda,” Okoye says with a sort of hushed horror.

“This is the end of us all,” T’Challa replies. “If we fail.”

“Then we must not fail.”

Wakanda mounts her defense and bleeds. The shields hold, but not for long. In the midday heat, the armies crash together. The fields are soon littered with human and alien corpses alike and the fighting doesn’t cease, punctuated occasionally by the Hulk’s roar.

Shuri and Jane are locked in their race against time. It slips away from them, bringing doom ever closer.

Loki kills one, then another, desperately driving back the horrid, howling creatures that swarm the field. All around him, the mortals attack, spraying alien blood across the grass. Just as he plunges a knife into one’s skull, another catches him by the left flank. He is knocked down, landing flat on his back. The impact drives the air from his lungs. He manages to kill the beast with magic before its teeth can close around his throat. He shoves the disgusting corpse aside. Loki struggles back to his feet where four more monsters await him.

All around him, the other warriors are equally swarmed. They’re quickly becoming overwhelmed.

 _They’re losing,_ he thinks with dread, but throws himself back into the fray anyway.

And then - thunder sounds on a clear day. The sky remains piercingly blue, but there is a peel of thunder and then, in the wake of swirling lighting and rainbow light, Thor materializes on the battlefield alongside the Valkyrie and a man Loki find vaguely familiar, but cannot place.

Loki laughs. In pure relief, with joy despite the strain in his body, the ache of the dozen small wounds. Thor is back, Thor is _angry_ , and Thor is swirling lightning and fury as he attacks the hordes, slaying dozens of them in a second.

“You’re late,” Loki manages when he lands beside him to catch his breath. There’s a lull in the battle, as the alien forces regroup.

Thor hefts his axe, scoffing. “I am not. Your plans worked marvelously, brother, and I brought-”

The Valkyrie rushes past Thor. For a second, Loki thinks she might hit him. Instead, she throws her arms around his neck. Then she hits him. She pulls out of the embrace and slaps him hard across the cheek.

“Ow.”

“I cannot believe you, I thought you were dead, you _ass!”_

“Okay, who’s this now?” Sam lands next to them and his wings fold up into his back.

“Angry girl!” The Hulk roars with delight.

“Hey big guy!”

“Well,” Loki says. “I’m glad to see you.”

“Hm, is that all you have to say for yourself, highness?”

“I do believe we have more pressing matters.”

“They’re lining up for another charge,” Steve calls. “Sam, can you-”

“Got it.” Sam takes to the air, swooping over them with a hail of gunfire.

Thor raises his axe. “I suppose we should get back at it.” He’s grinning. The energy of a good fight never failed to put Thor in a good mood. Loki can even let himself get caught up in it. Let himself believe, just for one moment, that this is just another one of the battles they’ve fought together over the years.

The tide turns, now that Thor has returned and brought back with him considerable firepower. He takes out an entire ship, downing it while thunder booms in the distance. Proxima faces the combined mights of Natasha, Okoye, and Wanda, and does not survive. Steve and T’Challa lead the armies into a new wave of fighting, fueled by the enthusiasm gifted to them by Thor’s appearance and their small victories. They start to beat back the hordes from the Wakandan capitol and slowly, slowly begin to gain ground.

But.

_But_.

The plot on Titan fails. Just at the moment Thanos is going to crush Tony Stark’s skull, Strange stops him.

“I’ll give you the Time Stone, if you leave us alive.” He conjures it to his hand and holds it out, an offering.

Thanos thinks about it. He could kill them. He has wanted to kill Stark for a long time, ever since his original invasion of Earth had failed. But there will be time for that later. They cannot go anywhere, and his goal is so, so close. He takes the Stone, retrieves a wounded but alive Ebony Maw from the wreckage of his ship, and conjures a new portal to Earth.

“Why would you…why would you do that?” Tony gasps. Strange stands, oddly calm.

Thanos steps through the portal, gauntlet missing only a single Stone.

The fight turns ill.

Shuri is not able to remove the Stone from the core of Vision’s being in time. They are overrun instead, forced to give up their task to protect their lives.

Vision cannot be kept from the battle any longer. He goes, the Mind Stone still embedded within him, still fueling his powers. He cannot be saved. He fights until the last moment, until, by a fallen tree, he turns to Wanda and shakes his head.

“We tried our best. But it is time.”

He cannot be separated from the Stone. Instead, he is obliterated by the force of Wanda’s love, and her grief. She drains her power destroying him and holding back Thanos with the other hand, and when it is over she collapses to her knees and screams.

The Mind Stone, and Vision, lie broken and gray on the Earth. He dies-

Only to, moments later, be brought back by the warping of time. Thanos has no expression on his face as he brings Vision back, dragging him back to life only to crush him and take the Stone from his head anyways.

The Mind Stone joins its siblings. The Gauntlet is complete.

The reverberations of the union can be felt throughout the fabric of the universe.

There is a knife, long and thin, in Loki’s hand when he attacks, thoughtlessly, furiously, with a cry of rage and pain. Thanos beats him back easily and Loki falls back, only spared by the Valkyrie, who covers him.

There’s a flash of light.

Thor’s axe blooms in Thanos’s chest, splattering blood across the trees. Thor lands lightly before him, trailing lightning and looking furious.

“I told you,” he growls as he presses the blade of the axe further into Thanos’s chest. “I would have my revenge. I swore it.”

But.

Thanos’s hand shakes.

“Thor, _the gauntlet!”_ Loki shouts.

_Snap._

A concussive wave of something. Like an icy wind biting at their skin. In its wake there is ringing silence.

“What was that?” Thor steps back. “What did you do?”

Everything is dead silent. No one dares to even breathe.

Across the universe, with barely a moan, trillions of bodies dissolve into ash.

Quietly, peacefully, half the universe dies.

On Titan:

Most of the remaining Guardians of the Galaxy dissolve, leaving only Nebula and Rocket still standing and whole.

Rocket turns in circles. “What the fuck just happened? Where’s-”

“He did it,” Nebula says. “He won.”

“Why would you, why…why did you do that?” Tony gapes at the sorcerer, who had handed over the Time Stone willingly.

“We’re in the endgame now.” Then Stephen Strange floats away on the wind, taking his magic and his prophecy with him.

“Mr…Mr. Stark?”

Tony Stark holds Peter Parker in his arms as he turns to ask and realizes how profoundly he has failed.

And then he is alone, left on a foreign, deserted planet, with a raccoon and a cyborg and no way home.

On Earth:

“What have you done?” Thor roars again. He catches his new axe by its silver handle as Thanos vanishes backwards through the portal he conjures. Thanos does not say another word. He does not have to. His task will speak for itself before long.

Bucky, mid-step towards Steve, is gone. T’Challa bends down to help Okoye to her feet and her hand slips through his as if through a ghost. She is left staring aghast at empty space. Rhodey calls out for Sam in the underbrush and no one answers.

Wanda, in the depths of her grief, feels relief as her body breaks apart and the view of the forest canopy fades to black.

“Did we just-” Lose? Peter Quill is gone before he gets the word out. Steve stares in shock, dropping to his knees before the pile of ash that was once Bucky.

Loki’s heart pounds sickly in his chest.

His only warning is his seidr, keening in his eyes. From a long ways away, he hears something like a drumbeat.

“What is this?” The Valkyrie says. “What in the-” It begins at her hand. She looks at it, astonished, then she’s dust, blowing away in the faint breeze.

Loki can’t catch his breath. His lungs feel suddenly clogged, unable to take in air. His hands are going numb.

“Thor,” he manages, raising a hand towards his brother. “Brother. I’m-” But as his lips form the word _sorry_ his lungs fail and he can no longer draw breath and his mouth tastes of ashes. His stomach flips, his knees buckle. His last sight before the darkness is Thor lunging for him and then he is falling.

He is a pile of ash before he hits the ground.

Thor stands alone in the shocked silence.

No one moves a muscle as the ash settles onto the earth.

Loki opens his eyes to a sky of swirling gray and violet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well. It has been a _while._
> 
> I worked on this for pretty much a full year. Some scenes made it relatively unscathed through the process, while other chapters got torn apart several times. It's the first fanfiction I've actually completely rewritten, and I think it was worth it. I'm pretty proud of the result, it's certainly not perfect - I've now learned about some of the pitfalls of working with such a massive cast of characters and coming up with a satisfying conclusion to this whole arc. It's given me a little bit of sympathy towards the writing and directing team (though of course...there are many of them and only one of me and also they got paid a lot of money and I do this for free, so it's just a liiiittle bit of sympathy for how hard this was XD). But I'm actually really happy with this. I really hope you all enjoy it as well. 
> 
> Today's prologue is just a short taste, the bridge between what was and what is to come. The next chapter will be posted on Friday, and then chapters will follow from there, being posted on Fridays, _hopefully_ in the mornings (I'll do my best). 
> 
> Title is a vague reference to ['Marius Amid the Ruins of Carthage'](https://www.albanyinstitute.org/details/items/marius-amid-the-ruins-of-carthage.html) that I once used in a conference paper. Recycling! I do actually have other citations to add, and some acknowledgments, but I'm going to save them for the end for the sake of spoilers. ;-) 
> 
> A general warning going forward: this fic will deal with apocalyptic themes (specifically about population decline) which might uh, hit a little harder now than they did when I started this series. (I swear, I wrote the majority of this fic long before the quarantine started - including a line in one chapter that I'm pretty sure no one is going to believe I wrote last summer and not within the last couple of months, but I 100% did). Other warnings remain fairly consistent to the series: references to past torture, some descriptions of violence. 
> 
> Anyways! I hope you folks enjoy! Kudos/Comments/Shares/Frogs always appreciated. See you Friday! <3


	2. The Unthinkable

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the shocked aftermath of Thanos's victory, no one really knows what to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- reiterating the warning posted in the endnote of the prologue: this fic has a lot of apocalyptic themes, including explicit discussion of disaster and death, just a heads up/reminder :-) 
> 
> Enjoy!

_“There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.”_

_-Mary Renault, The Charioteer_

“Table 4 wants more fries, oh, and your friend’s back.”

“Thanks, sugar, I got him. Hey Greg, how’s it going today, sweetie?” She pours a steaming cup of coffee into his mug.

“They’re back. The aliens.”

She smiles patiently. “Yeah, Greg. Sure. You want the usual?”

“You know, my grandson-”

“Wait, Ashley, look.” The other waitress turns up the volume on the TV in the corner.

“We’re live in New York, where massive alien spaceships have been dominating the skyline for half an hour now…”

“We’ll be home in 20 minutes, kids, start cleaning up back there. Honestly, it’s just a three hour car ride, I don’t know how they make such a mess.”

“Come on, they’re kids, it’s not that-”

“I am going to be digging Cheetos out of the seats for weeks.”

“No, you won’t, Mom, we were eating Doritos, not Cheetos!”

“Well, I guess that’s completely diff- Ben! Watch the-”

The car in front of them spins out of control. Metal twists and screams. The smell of burning rubber is in the air as the van skids, unable to avoid a collision. The cars crash together, one full, the other mysteriously empty but for a floating cloud of ash in the driver’s seat.

All around the world, traffic grinds to a halt as cars pile up in burning, twisted heaps.

They wheel the patient, already sedated, into the OR. The surgery starts as normal, a routine gallbladder procedure. The team puts on some music and gets started.

“Got a date tonight, I heard.” The surgeon says as he cuts through the first layer of skin.

The assisting nurse smiles under her mask. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I heard that admin down in the ER asking you out.”

“Doesn’t mean I said yes,” she says with a wink to let him know she’s joking.

“Hey, good for you, Diane, you deserve to have some - whoa, we’ve got a little extra bleeding going on there.”

As the surgeon cauterizes the leaking veins, machines begin to shrilly beep.

“Respiration is dropping - what the _hell?”_

Next to the anesthesia machine, where a moment ago the anesthesiologist had been quietly doing his job, there is a drifting pile of ash. When the surgeon turns back, the medical assistant and one of the other nurses have also vanished.

“Someone…someone find another anesthesiologist!”

“Pulse is dropping!”

“Dammit!”

“We’re losing him!”

“I’ve always been a nervous flyer.”

Shannon smiles politely. She loathes chatty seat neighbors, but can’t quite bring herself to just ignore him. “It’s the safest form of travel, technically.”

“Oh, I know, read all the studies and everything. I just-” The man tightens his grip on the arms of the seat at a slight bump.

“That was just the landing gear coming up.”

He smiles wanly. “Right.”

The plane continues gaining altitude. Shannon opens her book.

There’s a shudder. A flight attendant passes them, moving quickly to the front of the plane. She looks concerned.

“That doesn’t look good,” the man sitting next to her says, looking a little green.

“I’m sure it’s-”

The angle of the plane abruptly changes, sloping downwards.

“What the-” Shannon turns but the chatty man is gone, ashes swirling in his place. _“Fuck.”_

She chokes on the ashes suddenly thick in the air. Was there a fire? She feels no heat, sees no glow of flames, but the air in the plane is clogged with smoke - no, _ash_. Shannon coughs, trying to get it out of her lungs as the plane shudders and dives. Other passengers start to scream. A baby cries. A frantic voice comes over the intercom - the voice of the flight attendant who had rushed past.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are having to…having to make an emergency descent - assume the brace position.”

The absurd thought that a crash was one hell of an emergency descent passes through Shannon’s mind as she bends over her knees. Her heard pounds sickeningly in her chest. She continues to cough as the ash fills her lungs, chokes her. _She was going to die. God, they were really all about to die._

The plane falls.

“Okay guys, this is really not funny anymore. Hope? Bring me back up. Right now. Guys? Guys? Come on-”

On a rooftop in San Francisco, a van sits abandoned. Ash floats away on the breeze.

“What the fuck? Jason? Where the fuck did you go?” The teenage girl stumbles on the dock, sobbing, until she collides with a man in his 20s, looking pale and bewildering.

“Hey, are you okay?”

“No, I’m not okay! Does this look okay? I was walking with my boyfriend and now he’s just gone.”

“I know, I was with my buddies and then they were just…”

Around them swirls gray ash. So much that it blocks out the sun, turning the previously bright day dark. They both turn at the roar of an airplane, flying too low, just in time to watch the jet slam into the ground, a fireball rising in the wake of the crash.

“Holy shit!”

The whine of another engine makes them both turn back towards the road and they dive out of the way just in time to avoid a car jumping the barrier onto the pedestrian walkway.

All around them, the city falls apart. Sirens and screams fill the air. Fires crackle, smoke rises.

The world ends.

Thousands of miles away, in a small copse of trees, two men sit in silence as darkness gathers around them.

Thor feels _nothing_. More than nothing. He feels the Void in his chest, dragging on his body. The shock of their loss makes his face and hands feel numb. But he still can’t quite believe it. Still believes if perhaps he waits long enough, this will end up being another dream, another vision. Yes - a vision. This is just another vision of the future but there’s still time to fix it, now he knows, now he can properly warn everyone, do the right thing this time-

That’s how his memories feel. Like they’re distant events, ones that haven’t happened yet, or have happened to someone else. The crash was so fast, so sudden. One moment he was feeling more powerful than he ever had before. He had channeled the bifrost through his own body, he had brought lightning and vengeance, he had driven an axe through Thanos’s chest - and it was not enough. A single slip, a single mistake, and triumph turned to failure. Turned to bitter defeat. Turned to losses he cannot yet acknowledge.

He recollects the last vision he had before he left Wakanda for Nidavellir. The murky dream that dissipated as soon as he awoke. He remembers the taste of ashes thick in his mouth. He could not interpret the omen at the time. He hadn’t tried particularly hard. Hadn’t asked Loki for help. Thor had been too preoccupied with the thought of his impending departure.

He remembers fighting with Loki before he left. Imploring him not to make himself a sacrifice to this fight.

Well. That turned out not to matter at all. None of their efforts, none of their suffering, mattered one bit in the end.

Steve kneels in the shadow of a gnarled, windblown tree. His gaze is fixed on the earth, where ashes still flutter in the slight breeze.

Neither of them speak. Thor doesn’t know if he can speak.

The axe is propped next to him, sticking out of the dirt.

_Nice blade, majesty,_ the Valkyrie had said with breathless relief after he survived the forge. _Now let’s see if it works._

Even Stormbreaker had not been enough. Only enough to get him back here to watch Thanos’s victory.

There’s a bitter taste on his tongue. A sick sourness in his stomach.

Rhodes interrupts their vigil. “Guys,” he says, sounding exhausted and grieved. “It’s getting late. You should come in.”

Steve shifts a little on his knees, hanging his head, but neither of them say anything.

“You can’t just sit here all night,” Rhodes says gently. “Come on, we’ll go back up to the lab. We’ll…we’ll…” But that’s the problem isn’t it? What is there to do now? They’ve lost. It’s over.

Rhodes leaves them in silence, in the dark.

Bruce Banner swims to the surface.

When he left the lab, allowed the Hulk to emerge, he truly had no idea what the outcome would be. But he had hope. Foolish hope, maybe, but, he hoped when he returned, when he took control back from the Big Guy, there might be at least a glimmer of light.

Natasha’s hand is in his, tracing a line up his palm. Like the old days. _A lullaby,_ she’d suggested, so long ago. _Let the anger sleep for a little while, right?_

He catches his breath. “Hey. How’d we do?”

The look on her face is answer enough.

She leads him back into the lab, where screens display images of total destruction.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispers under his breath.

“We lost big,” Natasha says. “Thanos won. He got everything he wanted.”

Bruce wants to ask _who? who of us?_ but he’s too afraid of the answer so he keeps his attention on the nameless masses who scream and run from the unfolding disasters.

It’s almost pitch black outside, when Steve finally stirs. “We should…”

Thor agrees, but only because he is incapable of making any decision for himself. He feels like a ghost, a wraith, trailing Steve as he hikes up to the palace. The guards look haunted, staring at them with questions in their eyes that no one can answer as they let them through.

Natasha and Rhodes are in the room where they had planned their futile defense against Thanos. All the information scrawled on the boards is utterly useless now, all of it feels like a sputtering candle in the dark.

“Where’s…” Steve clears his throat. “Where’s Shuri?”

“Crying, in the throne room with her mother and Okoye. Bruce and Jane are…they’re trying to get a handle on things.”

“And…” Steve tries to rifle through names in his head, to remember who’s missing because he saw them fall and who’s missing because they’re just…elsewhere. “Sam, where’s Sam?” His voice edges on desperation - a wavering hope.

Rhodes shakes his head. “I swear, he was in the grass. I heard him but when I turned to look…”

Steve buries his face in his hands.

“We’re trying to figure out who else is alive.” Rhodes pulls up a screen where a single haggard and drawn news anchor tries to read his report. He leaves the volume down. Scenes of destruction - a skeleton crew of firefighters hosing off a burning building, clogged highways, people crying, searching the streets desperately. “I’ve been trying to call Tony. I’ve tried him a hundred times. Fury, the Security Council, the president…I have no idea who else could be dead-”

“I don’t think they’re dead.” Thor’s declaration is met with stunned silence for a full minute. He waits it out.

“Oh, Thor...” Natasha finally breaks the silence, pity in her voice.

“I am being serious,” Thor says. “I don’t think…whatever Thanos has done…it just. I would feel it. I know that I would feel…I don’t think they’re dead.” It’s hard to put into words, why he is so convinced that whatever happened…is not death. It still feels as though everything happening around him is still a vision, still the future. Things not yet happened.

On one of the chalkboards, at the very bottom, there are two lines of very neat, precise runes. Loki’s handwriting had always been like that. Sharp, exacting. He runs his finger through one line, erasing it, but leaves the other.

“Thor, I’m so sorry-”

“Don’t,” he snaps. “They are not dead. They can’t be. This…it is unnatural. It is not. It’s _not_ death. I _know_ death.”

No one says anything else. Steve won’t look at him. The silence echoes.

Thor finally, childishly, runs from their looks of pity. He retreats to a bench, on a balcony overlooking the city and sits in the darkness, trying not to move, or think.

Jane finds him, after a while. “Thor, I’m so sorry.” She sits beside him on the bench, rests her hand on his arm. “I can’t get a hold of Darcy or Selvig. We’re still counting the disappeared, but it’s _staggering_ -”

“Half the universe,” Thor says flatly. “That’s what he wanted. Half the universe to die. All because he had these…these notions that it would make what remained better. But really, he just wanted to watch…” _-people dance at the end of the rope before him._ Those aren’t his words. He doesn’t quite remember whose, but he can’t finish his sentence. He swallows. “I’m sorry, that I failed. I should have…this is my fault.”

“It’s not.”

“It is. A bit higher and…” His chest hurts. Guilt is a knife, stabbing at his chest. “I would like to be alone for a while, Jane.” She opens her mouth to protest. “Please.”

So she leaves him, returns to her attempts to do _something_ even though deep down they all must know that there is nothing to be done.

When he is alone, his head spins. He reaches back in his memory, trying to _think_ if there had been any clues about what would happen after Thanos got his victory. Something from when he was tortured on Sanctuary? Had Loki ever said anything about the specifics of how the Stones would be used? What this all _was?_

That line of thought only leads him to think about Loki. He lets himself now, after hours of trying to put him from his head. Had they embraced when he returned? Touched? Spoken? What were his last words to his brother? To the Valkyrie? He can’t remember. Through the fog of battle, he can’t _remember_ what was said or done. He had been so full of adrenaline, of power and certainty during the fight. He doesn’t remember slowing down, doesn’t remember what he said to Loki, can’t even conjure up a picture of how his brother had looked. He’d had no idea how precious these little details would become.

He closes his eyes, but all he sees is a cloud of ash, falling downwards.

When he was younger, he had been convinced that they were truly immortal. He thought he’d grown out of it, but evidently he had not. He’d been so convinced that they would win, that they were immortal, he hadn’t thought to plan for anything else.

He rests his head in his hands and spends the night alone on the bench, hating himself.

At dawn, his vigil is again disturbed.

“Oh.” Shuri stops in her tracks. She looks surprised to see him. “Oh, I’m sorry, I was just getting some air, I will leave you alone-”

“No,” Thor says. “No, it’s alright. Stay.”

She nods and sits on the other bench. They’re quiet for a minute. “It’s just…Okoye and Mother will not leave me alone. The others…they are already planning, they strategize and I just…”

“I understand.”

“I do not know what to _do.”_

Thor says nothing to that. He doesn’t know what to do either. The sun fully rises. The day is cloudless, inappropriately sunny.

“I heard Natasha say that you don’t think they’re dead.” There’s a painful sort of hope in her voice. Thor looks over at her. Her eyes are wide and brimming with tears - and a youthful optimism. “She said you’re just in denial but…do you really think…?”

“I cannot…I cannot think anything else,” he says quietly. “But you should not get your hopes too high.” There is a lump in his throat, a thickness that threatens tears. He takes a deep breath. “No. You should not hope, princess.”

“But…what am I supposed to do?”

Thor shakes his head. “I do not know.”

They’re interrupted a few minutes later by Natasha. Her hair is frizzing. There are tired bruises under her eyes. It doesn’t look like she’s slept any more than they have.

“Shuri, can you do something for us? We want…Bruce is trying to track this signal he’s picked up on, but he doesn’t know how to use your-”

“Natasha, let her-”

“No.” Shuri rises. “It is fine. I can help Dr. Banner. I can do this.” They watch her go inside. She walks with a tentative sense of purpose.

Natasha takes her seat on the bench. “How are you doing?” Gently. Pitying.

“I would be better if you did not use that tone with me.” Thor manages to give her a weak smile.

“Sorry,” she says as she returns it. “It’s just…we’re worried…”

“Yes, you are worried that I am in denial. That I have lost my mind in my grief and guilt over my failure. All because I do not believe my brother is dead. Well,” He quickly wipes away a tear as it drips down his cheek. His new false eye, scavenged from a junk drawer in Peter Quill’s ship, stings. He hasn’t quite gotten used to it. “I’m sure you can understand why I have my doubts. Twice now, I’ve lived with the thought that my brother was dead, both times it turned out to be false. I cannot help…cannot help believing that this time is just like the others.

Natasha nods. “I understand.”

“It is just…I would have seen it.”

“I thought you said you weren’t any good at prophecy.”

“I am not. But this…” Thor takes a deep breath. “Once, while we were imprisoned on the Raft, once when I was gone…I feared that they may have harmed him in my absence. They would threaten to kill him at my every misstep and sometimes I feared they would just do it, and not tell me, so they could continue to ensure my obedience. But then I thought to myself, no. No, that would never work. Because I would feel it. For all my failings as a seer, I know I would feel it if Loki were truly dead.”

“But if they’re not dead…Thor, what could this be?” It’s a rhetorical question. Because Natasha is certain that they’re dead. She’s trying to gently lead him into the conclusion.

Thor looks away. “I don’t know.”

They return to the lab, following Shuri. She’s typing at a computer when they arrive and doesn’t look up.

“Hey,” Rhodes greets. “Their scan found something.”

Bruce looks up as Thor comes to stand beside him. “So they’re…Loki and Val…they’re…”

“Yes.” Thor wonders if Bruce blames him as much as he blames himself.

“I never thought I’d wish to go back…” Bruce’s gaze is distant. Thor knows what he’s talking about, has felt it for a long time. That they would look upon the days traveling the stars in a cramped, rundown spaceship in the wake of Asgard’s destruction with such breathless longing…

Steve enters, looking like he hasn’t slept yet either. “I heard you’ve got something?”

“Yeah,” Bruce says. “A signal.”

“A strong one. The range…it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.” Jane brings up the map. “In one very localized spot. This seems to be coming from a single point.”

“It is in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States.”

“Atlanta?” Natasha says with surprise. “That’s strange.”

“We should check it out,” Steve says. He takes a deep breath. “But not all of us. I think only a few of us should go, the rest stay here, where it’s safe.”

“Who?” Rhodes asks.

“I think me, Nat, and Thor.” Steve’s eyes glance at him, then away. “The rest of you should stay here, to keep working. Rhodes-”

“Yeah, I heard from Pepper. I’m going to go check on her, see if I can get a handle on what’s going on in Washington.”

“Good. And the three of us can go trace the signal in Atlanta.” Steve sounds like a soldier again, planning out their attack. He sounds more confident now that he has a plan. “And then proceed to New York.”

“I agree,” Thor says.

“Wait a second,” Bruce turns in his chair. “I don’t know how I feel about us splitting up.”

“Yeah,” Jane says. “You could just be going back into danger.”

“Which is why only the three of us should go,” Natasha says. “We’ve seen what’s going on out there, little glimpses anyway. It’s going to be absolute chaos. Governments collapsing, disasters. You have to stay here, the technology and power structure is the most stable. You’re going to do your best work here.”

“Yes, here will be the safest. If, of course, it is all right with you, your majesty,” Rhodes turns to Shuri.

“She looks a little startled. “Sorry?”

“It is your call as queen,” Thor tells her gently. “If you do not wish them to stay, you may say so.”

“Oh. No, I…they can stay. I would be glad of their presence, uh, assistance.” She clears her throat. “Please stay.”

“Of course,” Jane says. “We’ll stay here and we’ll work with what we have.”

“After we check out the signal in Georgia, we’ll head up to the compound and see how things are faring. You might be able to join us there, at the very least we’ll connect with you.”

“We should be able to establish a solid connect,” Bruce says. “So if you need help figuring out the signal, we should be able to interpret the data.”

“Let’s just hope everything’s in one piece.”

“You guys know Tony,” Rhodes says. “I’m sure he built in some failsafes.” He says this without confidence. He’s clearly distracted, sad and worried about the fact that no one has seen or heard from Tony since this all started.

“Right,” Steve says. “We should head out.”

Shuri stands up. “I’ll go let them know you need a plane.”

“Are you sure about this?” Jane asks. She’s looking directly at Thor. “Maybe you should take another day, to process.”

“We don’t have the time to wait.” Thor looks away from her. He knows that look in Jane’s eye. He saw it every day after Svartalfheim. Mingled guilt and pity. That look had driven him further and further away until it became abundantly clear that their romantic relationship would not survive their shared adventures. He nods at Steve. “Let’s go.”

“Wait,” Bruce stops him. “Thor…we still have the open connection to the Ark. Do you want me to pass on a-”

“No,” Thor says quickly. “No, not…Not until I have something more than failure to show them.” Heimdall would have already seen what happened. If he was still alive, even. Thor doesn’t think he could bear finding out. As much as his reluctance to contact the remnants of his people is out of unwillingness to tell them what he has done, it is also that he does not think he’ll survive another blow. He starts out of the hall and then turns back. “Tell them I’m still alive. That they should stay quiet, out of danger. And tell them that I am going to fix this.”

Natasha and Steve pilot the jet across the Atlantic. As they approach the coastline, Rhodes deploys his suit and slips out the hatch to go find Pepper and see what government remains in the United States. They turn the jet south after his departure, quickly approaching their target.

When they’re close, Steve leaves Natasha at the helm and comes to sit across from Thor in the back. He sighs tiredly.

“Are you all right, Steve?” Thor asks. Though they had spent those long hours sitting together, in their pathetic vigil, they had not spoken since the end of the battle.

Steve manages a little laugh. “Well. The world is ending.”

“No. I have seen the end of a world.” It had burned. _Asgard is not a place, it’s a people._ Now the place remains, but the people are gone. It seems more consuming. “This is the _universe_ ending. The end of everything.” Thor takes a deep breath and runs his hand over the handle of his axe. “When Asgard was destroyed, the rest of Yggdrasil remained. There were place we could go, to start anew. This…no civilization could survive this.”

“Christ. You’re right. This is…You know.” Steve runs his hand threw his hair. “It felt like the world was ending. Back then. 1939. It felt like everything was collapsing around us, like there couldn’t possibly be anything beyond what we were experiencing. But then, you’d leave the front lines, you’d go to Paris or London, or back stateside, and people would be dancing and creating things, and imagining a world beyond. A future. I just…don’t get the sense that’s going to be possible this time.”

Because there are no pockets of peace. There is no one who can help because all are drowning. The whole universe, drowning. Soon to be as cold and empty as the Void.

“We’ve got to fix this, right? I don’t know how, but…there’s no other way through right.”

“No. I do not know how to fix this either but I agree. We cannot let Thanos’s victory stand.”

“Shit. And…we owe it to them, right?” Steve has to stop a moment and clear his throat. “It’s just. Fuck. Fifty, sixty years being dragged around by HYDRA and we had just finally gotten him free. He was actually _happy_ again, for the first time since the war started. Really happy with those stupid goats. It just doesn’t seem fair. It’s just not fair.” Thor sits back against the wall. His hands and face feel strangely numb again. He’s thinking about the hesitant way Loki would smile at something Sam said, the way he would watch with curious amusement Shuri’s enthusiastic antics. Things had appeared to be easing. They could have survived. And now they were all gone. Loki, Valkyrie, Sam…gone.

“If anyone didn’t deserve to die…it should have been…” Steve stops, trailing off. I _t should have been me._ It’s what Steve is not saying, but Thor can read it in his face. It’s what he’s been thinking too. “So we fix this. Somehow.” Steve glances up at him. “Nat said…do you really think they’re not dead?”

“I don’t know. I think…at the very least, there is something more going on than we understand. Whatever Thanos did with the Stones…I feel there is something else. There has to be.” Thor rubs his thumb on the blade of the axe, feeling its bite. “Just a feeling. Everyone thinks I am in denial, of course. Grieving. Even Jane. They all think that I am losing my mind.”

“I don’t think they think that.”

“They do. In the kindest way possible, they believe I am losing my mind.” Thor’s eyes and nose burns. “But I cannot think anything else. Not until I have exhausted all other possibilities of…fixing things. Or at least doing justice for what we have lost. It is perhaps the only way I can have even the smallest flicker of hope.”

Steve nods. “You’re right.” He clears his throat again. “First step, this weird signal. Then we take what comes next.”

“Precisely.”

“Where do you think he went? Thanos?”

Thor frowns. “I don’t know. I don’t know if even he had thought beyond this point. I want to imagine that somehow he is suffering but I feel…it is likely he is at some sort of peace, for now at least.”

“Well. We'll have to end that," Steve says darkly. "At least you got in a good shot. That chest wound will hurt for a while.”

“Yes. A good shot. But not good enough.” He nicks his thumb on the edge of the axe.

They lapse into silence until Natasha calls back that they’ll be landing soon.

Steve turns to look at him, really full in the face for the first time since Thor had returned from Nidavellir. He tilts his head, raises an eyebrow, and asks, “When did you get a new eye?”

Thor breaks into a real, amused smile.

Natasha lands the jet a little outside the city center, in a large enough plot of grass. Thor leaves his axe, but Natasha keeps her guns and Steve his new Wakandan shield, strapped to his back. They’re still unsure of what to expect, so they disembark cautiously and make their way through the streets with care.

Ash coats everything.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Steve says under his breath. They cannot help but think about how they are walking through bodies as they head downtown.

Atlanta is in a state of deserted chaos. Most people have been moved off the streets, found shelter, but there is the scars of destruction. There are still firefighters trying to put out the fires, ambulances moving cautiously through the streets. And of course, the ash covering the ground. Some pale city workers dressed in coveralls with masks over their faces are sweeping it up, placing the mingled bodies in large metal drums.

“Captain,” a worker gasps when he sees them. He’s covered in dust, wearing blue coveralls, with a cloth covering the bottom half of his face. “Holy shit, you’re back.” He looks like he’s about to salute. “Sir, what are your-”

Steve waves him off. “I don’t have any orders, unfortunately. We still just…trying to assess what’s going on, just like you are. Can you tell me what happened here?”

He pulls down the cloth and wipes sweat from his brow. “They all just vanished. Thousands, gone in a second. They were crashing cars, a helicopter went into a building a little north of here, you should keep clear of that area, sir. Fire department’s still trying to put it out. We haven’t gotten any other help, it’s chaos-”

“They will, I’m sure of it. For now, just…shelter in place. Put out fires as they come.”

“Yes, sir.” Now he does salute, in that clean, precise way that makes Steve wonder what division he’d been in. He grimaces.

“Steve,” Natasha holds up the Wakandan tracking device they were using to track the signal. “This way.”

The man looks past Steve and looks even more agog when he sees Thor and Natasha. “Sorry, you’re…I’m interrupting.”

“Not a problem. We’ve got some leads but…keep in mind, we know as little as you do right now.” But the man looks already more hopeful, more confident. Reassured now that the Avengers are on the case.

“If there’s anything we can do,” he stands a little straighter. “Just let us know, Captain. You know, I never believed what they said about you. Never.”

Steve has a pained look on his face as he turns to follow Natasha.

“Shouldn’t have done that,” he says when they’re out of earshot.

“Done what?” Thor asks.

“I shouldn’t have given him hope. He’s going to tell everyone we’re going to figure it out…”

“And will be disappointed if we do not. But there’s nothing to be done about that.” Steve gives him a questioning look. “It does not matter what we say or what we do. The people will look to us as beacons. They will look to us for hope, even if all we ever do is let them down.” Thor sighs heavily. “ _That_ is one thing I have learned as king.”

“Guys, it’s down here,” Natasha calls. “Keep up!” They take two more turns, walking down the middle of the streets, surrounded by crashed and burning cars. Natasha pauses. “I think there’s a body in that one.”

“They’ve got a black tag,” Steve says. “Triage has already been through here.”

“And no one’s come through to take away the bodies?”

“How many people do you think are left in the medical examiner’s office?”

“Shit,” Natasha says under her breath. “And in the Georgia heat…that’s not going to smell great in a couple hours.”

They follow the signal to a black SUV. Both front doors are open, the door alarm beeping insistently. The keys are still in the ignition. Natasha hits a few buttons on the device and walks around the car. “Okay, the signal’s coming from…this.” She kneels down and picks up a small black device from the pavement.

“What is it?” Steve asks. Thor frowns and shakes his head.

“Are you two serious?” Natasha looks between them. “It’s a pager. A beeper?” They just stare back. “Okay, how do I explain this? You use it to send short messages, and usually a phone number. So the person gets the phone number, finds a phone and calls back. They went out of favor a while back, long before you got out of the ice. Some fields still use them, medicine mostly, but you don’t see them too often.”

“This one has been modified.” Thor holds out a hand and Natasha passes it over. “I do not recognize this symbol, but the modifications look Kree in origin.”

“Kree?”

“A powerful empire, centered on Hala. Quite some distance from Earth. They’ve been embroiled in their own conflicts for years.”

“Could this come from Thanos? Maybe this could lead us to him?” Natasha takes the device back, turns it over in her hands.

“Perhaps. There had been occasional rumors of Kree extremists working for Thanos, though I don’t believe there were any when I was aboard Sanctuary. But it’s possible.”

“We’ll have to get it back to the compound to test it. See if we can trace the signal. Figure out who they want to call back.”

Steve leaves them examining the pager and goes to the car. There are two duffel bags in the backseat containing clothes, a few personal items. It looks like a man and a woman traveling together, judging by the contents of the bags. There’s a case on the floor. Steve opens it.

It’s full of guns and knives.

“Now that’s interesting.” The trunk reveals more weapons and, tucked between the seat and the wall, a discarded SHIELD badge. “What the hell?” Steve mutters to himself. He cross around to the open passenger side door. In the glove compartment, he finds a black zippered case. It’s full of assorted identity documents: passports, driver’s licenses, health cards. None of the names are the same, none of them are familiar.

But the pictures are _very_ familiar.

“Shit,” Steve mutters. He backs up and looks around the car. There are two distinct piles of ash. _“Shit.”_

“What?” Natasha asks. “What is it?” He just hands over the case. Natasha flips through them, the expression on her face rapidly falling. “Oh no. Fury. Oh God.” She hands the case to Thor and looks at the piles of ash next to the car and looks like she’s going to vomit.

“So this is Fury’s device, I assume.” Thor shuts the case. “He was calling for someone at the end. Someone with Kree technology.”

“The question is,” Natasha swallows. “Who?”

They clean out the SUV, taking all the identity documents, weapons, and the still signaling pager. After a silent conversation where they all just look at each other, they leave the piles of ash where they’d fallen.

They walk back to the jet and take off, leaving the city to its cleanup. Blue and red lights dance across the jet’s windshield and they can see smoke still rising, but there is nothing they can do to help, so they just have to go.

They fly to New York, staying under the radar.

The compound is dark when they arrive, cold and completely abandoned. They land in the field and power down the jet.

“It doesn’t look like anyone’s here,” Natasha says quietly. “But we should do a sweep to make sure, before we start turning on the lights. Thor takes his axe this time.

They begin a thorough search of the compound, moving from room to room.

“Stark didn’t really waste any time getting rid of our stuff, did he?” Natasha whispers as they slip into the living quarters.

“I believe he said he placed it all in storage,” Thor replies.

She shrugs. “Not like I had much personal affects anyways.” They pass Steve’s old room, which contains only spare robotics parts.

Thor is tense, returning here, which thankfully neither Steve nor Natasha comment on. The last time he had been on these grounds, he had been facing down Ross. He remembers that day so clearly. The feel of Loki’s hand in his, how his lungs had burned and his healing ribs ached as they tried to run.

_What will they do to us, should they catch us?_

_Loki, move!_

It feels so real, he almost thinks that Ross himself will pop out of the shadows, but the compounds remains quiet and empty.

Until they are near the labs. The approach a door leading to one of the lounges in the R&D department, where the team would sometimes decompress, and hear a muffled sound from inside. They all freeze. Another thud.

Natasha makes a hand signal. _Wait. Get ready._

Thor raises his axe. Natasha draws a gun. Steve slips the shield from his back and settles it on his arm. Then he approaches the door and, covered by Natasha, slowly, carefully pushes it open.

Natasha charges in, weapon raised - and stops, lowering the gun instantly.

Sitting on the couch in semi-darkness, is Clint Barton. He’s dressed in dirty jeans and a flannel shirt. He looks up and his face is streaked with tears, eyes red.

“Nat?” He scrambles to his feet. “Jesus, Nat, you’re alive.” She rushes towards them and they embrace. Clint squeezes her tight, crying into her hair. “Oh God, Nat, they’re gone. They’re all gone.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bleak. Bleak. Things are _bleak._ :-(
> 
> I'm sorry? But hey, I had to write it. I bummed myself out months ago. Now I'm just sharing it! A lot of the inspiration for this fic came from Emily St. John Mandel's _Station Eleven_ , Alan Weisman's _The World Without Us_ , and _numerous_ discussions I had both on and offline about the actual consequences of such a catastrophic population decrease. When I said this fic was going to be apocalyptic, I meant it. XD
> 
> Happy Friday, my friends! Thank you all so much for your comments and your support and your enthusiasm on the prologue! I truly appreciate the patience and the response. <3  
>    
> Next week, we'll find out where everyone went when they turned to ash, and things take a more mystical turn. 
> 
> See you then! Have a good weekend!


	3. When You Meet Your End

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Loki opens his eyes to a sky of swirling gray and violet._
> 
> Half the universe wakes in a strange world.

_“Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.”_

_-André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism_

Thanos snaps his fingers.

Things ripple out from there.

The scream builds. A single scream made of a thousand voices, reverberating through the fabric of the cosmos. A scream of rage and pain and grief as trillions of bodies unravelled as souls were split and cast into darkness.

It is all wrong. It is a crime against existence itself. The universe itself screams in fury but can do nothing to stop it as something vital slips out of place, a joint dislocated. A wound bleeding.

There is not much time left, not after what Thanos has done.

There is not much time left.

Loki lays very, very still, looking up at a sky of swirling violet and trying to take stock of his body.

He is breathing, the air moving in and out of his lungs easily. He is not in pain. It is quiet here, and the sky is purple. He does not remember what happened. He starts to piece it together, to build back up his memory one moment at a time.

Loki remembers a battle. He remembers falling. But they had been on Midgard, where the sky is blue. And a battle…there would be people, sounds. This place is silent.

He _feels_ whole and uninjured, but he cannot shake the memory of aches and pains of injuries from the fight. He distinctly remembers feeling ribs crack, remembering feeling unable to breathe just before he collapsed and his memory goes blank. His heartbeat picks up but he fights to remain calm. Gingerly, he moves his limbs and when there is still no pain, he sits up.

He is not alone.

There are others, carefully rising as well. The Valkyrie is closest to him, staggering to her feet. Sam is helping Bucky to his feet. King T’Challa stands slowly, bracing himself on a big tree. The man who had appeared with Thor and the Valkyrie sits back against the trunk of a tree, looking like he’s catching his breath. Wanda is there as well, on her hands and knees, making no move to rise or look around.

“Okay,” Sam says, breaking the silence. “Where the heck are we?” They are in the middle of a small copse of trees, identical to where they had made their final stand against Thanos.

_Another memory_ , Loki thinks as he looks at the trees. At the end, they had been fighting Thanos. Yes, he remembers that.

But the copse of trees is alone. Like a small, protective barricade of trees amidst a flat plain of _nothing_. Like a desert around them, flat plain lit by violet and rose light. This place smells like nothing. It tastes like nothing. The temperature is imperceptible, neither hot nor cold. Loki remembers being hot. Being covered in dirt and sweat and blood. The air had been heavy with the stench of blood and smoke. There is none of that now.

“What the _fuck_ just happened?” Sam’s voice echoes across the plain. He’s not shouting, but his voice pierces the silence like he had.

They are alone, the six of them. Thor is no where to be seen. Odd, when Loki’s last image is of Thor’s face, panicked, reaching for him-

It all comes back in an instant. The pieces weave together and Loki understands what happened. Thanos’s victory. Thor reaching for him. The taste of ashes on his tongue as his magic screamed. He gasps in a ragged breath.

The Valkyrie appears at his shoulder, touching it lightly. “You all right, highness?”

He manages to nod, but his mind is still reeling. “You?”

“Yes, fine. Except perhaps…a little spooked. Could use a drink, if you really want to know how I’m feeling. So. Where are we?”

Loki opens his mouth and closes it again. He still cannot answer her question, though the picture of what happened is starting to coalesce.

“Are we freakin’ _dead?”_ The stranger asks.

“I don’t know.” Bucky shakes his head. “I don’t remember dying. Just…falling?”

“I do not think we’re dead,” T’Challa says as he looks around. “This does not…” He trails off, brow furrowed.

“We are,” Wanda moans. She finally raises her head. Her face is streaked with tears, eyes red. “We’re all dead.”

“I don’t think we are,” Sam says. “Maybe that’s just denial but man…I don’t think we’re dead. This feels real weird.”

“When I was crowned king,” T’Challa turns back to them. “There was a ritual. Part of the coronation is a ritual. The new king travels to the afterlife, to the land of the ancestors, to have parting words with the one who came before. Twice I travelled there, and both times I saw my father. This place doesn’t feel like that. It feels empty. Wherever we are…I cannot think we are dead.”

“Or maybe we’re just somewhere else,” the Valkyrie says. “There are many afterlives. I’ve taken a few brief trips myself to our own Hel…I will admit this is nothing like Hel. But it could be somewhere else.”

“But if we were dead, then shouldn’t we have ended up wherever we were destined to go, or whatever? Why would we all end up here together?” Sam says. “I should be begging for entry at the pearly gates, shouldn’t I?”

Bucky shakes his head. “Maybe we’re dead but…whatever Thanos did…got us stuck here together. Where’s everyone else, then?” Sam shakes his head.

“Half…it’s always half,” the stranger says without looking at any of them.

“Yes. Half the universe. I suppose we are the unfortunate half.” Loki waits a moment. “I must agree with the king, however. I do not believe we are dead. Though I don’t think we’re quite alive either.”

Sam gapes at him. “What does that even mean?”

“We’re something in between,” Loki says. Though, he’s not sure he’s been able to tell the difference between life and death for a long time. But things feel strange. His body feels both solid and like it doesn’t quite fit. His skin crawls. The way the others are fidgeting, some absentmindedly scratching at their skin is any indication, they all feel it too. “So we know that while we are not among the living, we are not in any afterlife I’ve ever heard of either. We’re certainly not in Hel, or we’d surely have run into my sister by now.”

“Thank the Norns for that,” the Valkyrie mutters.

“You’ve got a sister?” Sam asks.

“Yes, well. We did. Banished her to Hel, presumably, in the destruction of Asgard.” He takes a deep breath. “No…I don’t think that we’re dead. But we’re…something else.”

“So what does that make us? Undead?” Bucky asks with a raised brow.

“And how do we get out of here?”

“I have no idea,” Loki says. “Not yet, anyway.”

“Doesn’t this remind you of Vormir, Val?” The stranger says. Everyone turns to him.

Loki’s eyebrow twitches up at the casual address. _Val?_ He mouths at the Valkyrie but she ignores him.

“It does. Sort of.” She tilts her head back. “Different colors, but the way the sky looks, and the darkness…”

Loki turns to the stranger and his brow furrows. “And who are you?” As he thought on the battlefield, the man looks vaguely familiar but he can’t quite place him.

“Oh, right,” the Valkyrie waves her hand at him. “This is Peter Quill. What do you call yourself? Star-something?”

“Star _lord_. Leader of the Guardians of the Galaxy.”

“Which galaxy?” Bucky asks.

“Oh, you know,” Peter shrugs. “Whatever galaxy. We, uh, bounce around a bit. But, um, I’m actually from Missouri.”

“Missouri,” Sam says faintly. “Right.”

Loki looks at the man another long moment, willing himself to remember. “And you accompanied Valkyrie to Vormir?”

“Yeah,” Valkyrie says. “Which, I admit, this place does remind me-”

Loki remembers in a flash and it all makes sense. The Valkyrie trails off, seeing the recognition dawn on his face.

“Ah,” he says. “I remember you.” They had only met once, only briefly. Loki had been half wild with panic at the time. But he remembers this man, promising to get the Ravagers off their tail. He remembers the look of guilt on Gamora’s face, the one she tried to hide as she turned her back to him. “She’s dead, then?”

Peter nods. “Yeah, she’s dead. Gamora. She’s dead.”

“Thanos took her to Vormir,” the Valkyrie fills in. “To get the Soul Stone…there had to be an exchange.”

“Ah,” Loki says. He remembers Gamora’s face, contorted with emotion in the vision he conjured, when she had revealed Vormir as the hiding place of the Soul Stone to stop Nebula’s torture.

“Okay wait,” Sam says. “I need to play a little catch up here. I need some updates, guys.”

Peter opens his mouth to respond, but the Valkyrie interrupts him. “We went after Thanos,” she says quickly, before he can reply. “And when Loki’s vision told us to go to Vormir, that’s where we went.” She fills them in on the rest of their journey - their conversation with the guardian of the Stone, the glimpse of the body that disappeared when they reached the bottom of the cliff. She concludes with their journey to Nidavellir, meeting up with Thor to forge the axe - Stormbreaker.

Loki absentmindedly chews on his thumbnail. Silence falls after her recounting.

“So. If we’re…wherever we are…where is everyone else?” Sam asks, finally saying what they’ve all been thinking.

“They’re back in Wakanda,” T’Challa answers. “If Thanos’s goal was to…eliminate half the universe, as Loki testified, then the other half will have remained.”

“So they think we’re dead,” Bucky says quietly. “Shit.”

“Yes. I assume that they believe us to be dead,” Loki drops his hand to the other, squeezes hard. _Again_ , Loki thinks, _you have done this to your brother a third time…_

“We _are_ dead.” Everyone jumps a little at Wanda’s sudden declaration. She has not spoken in several minutes. Her voice is rough, face still drawn. “You are all grasping at straws of hope. But we’re dead and we should just start accepting it.”

“I cannot believe that,” T’Challa says. “This…something feels different from death. I cannot believe it.”

“How would you know?” She staggers to her feet. “You said you visited death once, in a ritual. You haven’t felt it seep into your bones. You haven’t felt what it is like to die. My power gave me that ability twice to feel as death took a soul. How it tears into you. First my…then…then…the life _I_ took.” She wipes the tears off her checks. “We are dead. That is all.”

“Okay, I don’t know who you think you-”

“Valkyrie,” Loki stops her. “Leave her alone. She has a right to her opinion. And we don’t know anything for certain.”

“I can’t give up that easily. If we are dead, then we are dead and eventually our efforts will prove fruitless,” T’Challa starts to pace. “But if we are…somewhere else, and there is a chance for us to reverse Thanos’s evildoing and we give up…”

“I agree,” Sam says. “We work this from as many angles as we can until we’ve exhausted all possibilities.”

“It will only hurt worse when we finally give up,” Wanda insists.

“I don’t think it will,” Bucky says quietly. “If we finally learn we’re dead, knowing we did all we could to get back to the people we left behind. I think…it will feel like we at least tried.”

Wanda turns away.

“We need a plan,” Sam says. “We’ll need to do some exploring, figure out our terrain.”

“And ourselves…” Loki frowns. He holds his hands out. For a moment nothing happens, and then green light sparks in his palms. He dismisses the witchlights and reaches into the inter-dimensional pocket he’s long used as a secret storage and conjures forth an extra cloak.

“So your magic works,” the Valkyrie says.

“Evidently.” He rolls up the cloak and sets it on the ground. “Though it’s technically possible that it is just an illusion. If we are immaterial here, this could just be an illusion of my magic.”

The Valkyrie grabs the cape he had set aside. “If this is an illusion, why can I feel it? If you’ve just imagined it, why can I touch it?”

“Like a shared hallucination?” Sam says. “You believe he’s conjured it as much as he did, so you can pick it up?”

Loki nods. “Perhaps. It felt strange when I conjured it. Off. I cannot quite explain it yet, but it feels…strange.”

“See? We’re cursed here,” Wanda says. She raises her hand and scarlet light envelops it. “This is not magic. This is _hollow_. This is _dead_.” The light vanishes. “You know I’m right.”

“We do not know, though,” T’Challa says patiently. “We do not _know_ anything.”

Bucky is studying one of the trees. He reaches up and snaps off a branch, takes it in his metal hand and drags it across the flesh of the other until blood wells in his palm. His expression remains unchanged. “So we can bleed. And feel pain.”

“And feel tired. I’m _wrecked_ ,” Sam says.

“But the injuries we had before we got here were erased,” Peter says. “One of them got a good slice to my shoulder, but that’s gone now.”

“Yeah, same, I’d had a couple good knocks but I feel fine,” Sam says.

“So there is an element of corporeality to our situation,” Loki says. “We can feel pain, and tire, but our injuries have vanished. These are not the bodies we knew.”

“And like you said, there’s a chance there is no corporeality,” the Valkyrie says. “If we’re all creating this in our minds.”

“Okay. That’s…that’s too much to think about,” Peter says. “Too much. Can’t think about that.”

“Perhaps we should rest,” T’Challa says. “See if we can sleep. It is getting dark.”

He’s right. The sky has shifted to a darker shade of violet, though there is still no sun to set. The space outside of their trees darkens, the horizon fading into shadow.

“We should set a watch,” Sam says. The silence is eerie now that they can see nothing outside the borders of their small sanctuary.

“I can take the first,” the Valkyrie says. “Join me, highness?”

Loki agrees. Sam and Bucky agree to go second, T’Challa and Peter third. There is an unspoken agreement to leave Wanda out of it, to let her rest. Perhaps in the morning her grief will not be so bitter.

They settle in amongst the trees, using clothing and some odds and ends that Loki manages to conjure to create makeshift bedding. There’s no way to tell time here, or to know how long night will last, so they agree to approximate the watches as best as possible and expect to have to cycle through a few times until they figure out a way to mark the hours.

The others drop off to sleep quickly, leaving Loki standing on the edge of the copse with the Valkyrie.

There’s silence for a minute, suddenly awkward.

“I was glad to see you,” he says finally. “Until you struck me, of course.”

She cracks a smile. “Heat of the moment. I was so pissed you two let me think you were dead. I did the same to-” She cuts off with a worried glance.

Loki has been trying not to let his thoughts linger too long on what they have left behind. He doesn’t want to think about what’s going on back on Earth. He is _fairly_ certain that Thanos vanished before the wave of destruction started but he could always have turned back. He could have returned, he could have-”

“I missed you,” the Valkyrie says and pulls him from his own dark thoughts. “Really. I did. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry I wasn’t there.” Her voice is thick with emotion. “I’m sorry I left you.”

“You were following the plan.”

“It was a shit plan.”

“Hey,” Loki gives her a faint grin. “I came up with that plan.”

“Ah, that explains it. It was a shit plan, highness, I shouldn’t have left you. I should never have-”

“And then you would have been captured and tortured and locked away with us. Or just killed, if Thanos felt he had no need of you. And what good would that have done?” He folds his arms and turns away from the shattered expression on the Valkyrie’s face.

“Well. I’m sorry all the same.”

Loki nods. “We tried to contact you once we reached Earth. But, well. That went about as well as our stay on Sanctuary.” The Valkyrie grips his arm, squeezing. It’s very nearly reassuring. He cannot help the small voice inside of him that wails for what he has once again been torn from.

He bites his lip.

They settle into a more comfortable silence now, watching the dark violet swirls of the sky. They see and hear nothing.

“Do you really think there’s hope?” The Valkyrie asks quietly.

“I think I’ll go mad if I think anything else,” Loki says. “Truly. And I’m heartened by the fact that we are together. There must be some reason for that.” A vicious voice in his head hisses, _but when has reason ever mattered?_

She squeezes his arm again. “We can figure out how to get out of here. Get revenge on the bastard, right? The Revengers? We just have to hope that Thor and Bruce don’t steal all the glory from us.”

Loki laughs though his eyes burn. “I can’t help but feel rather guilty,” he says. “This is the third time I have allowed Thor to believe I am dead. Rather inconsiderate of me. He’ll be cross again when we return.” _When_ , because for now at least he has to believe that there will be a solution to their current predicament. That there is some way to fix what Thanos has done to the universe.

He knows Thor won’t be angry. He will be relieved, surely. Loki can almost feel the way Thor’s arms would settle around him. The thought of it sends a knife of pain through his chest. Absentmindedly, his hand raises to touch the epicenter of the pain.

“Yes. _When_ we get out of here.” The Valkyrie stares hard into the darkness, her jaw set in a firm line.

Sam and Bucky relieve them some time later, and they settle under the dark boughs of the trees, pressed close together. The Valkyrie drops off to sleep quickly, snoring gently. Loki stays awake for a while after, trying to bury the grief that threatens to consume him.

The second watch is equally quiet, uneventful. There is no sign of any other creature in this world. The darkness remains still.

“Do you think we’re right?” Bucky asks eventually, when he can’t stand looking into the darkness anymore.

“I hope so. If not…fuck, man, the universe, God, whatever, really fucking hates us.”

“Yup. Got all my memories back, finally figured out what works to kill the brainwashing…only to get trapped in this creepy dimension. With you.”

“Yeah, this definitely sucks.” Sam leans against the tree. “But…for what it’s worth…we can at least look out for each other, right?” Bucky looks at him like he’s grown an extra head. “Really. I know we haven’t always gotten along great, but we’ve got nothing else. Might as well stick together. Have each others’ backs?”

“Right. Yeah. Sure.” Bucky glances back out into the darkness. “What do you think Steve’s doing right now?”

Sam sighs. “I don’t know but I’m guessing it’s something fucking stupid.”

The third watch is silent. Two strangers stand in the dark in a slightly awkward, but companionable silence.

The sky begins to lighten not long into T’Challa and Peter’s watch, turning to the soft pinkish purple that they had first woke to.

“The dawn, I suppose,” T’Challa says. “Though I can still see no sun.”

“Yeah. Weird. But we made it through without getting attacked, so that’s a good sign right?”

T’Challa frowns. “I suppose.”

Loki wakes after a night of strange dreams to light sky.

“Morning,” the Valkyrie says. She’s shaking out the cape she’d been using as a bedroll.

“Did you sleep well?”

She sighs. “I had weird dreams.”

“I did as well. But I’m not stranger to nightmares.” Loki doesn’t want to admit that he had woken several times and looked for Thor, until he remembered that Thor was not there. It leaves him with a sour taste in his mouth and a yawning pit in his chest.

“Nothing happened on any of the watches?”

“Nothing.”

“Nope.”

“Yeah, nothing for us as well,” Peter says with a yawn. “Totally silent. Which is creepy in itself.”

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “I’d almost have preferred something happened. We would have had more clues.”

“It still feels as though we are alone here,” Wanda says quietly. She looks better than the day before. She does not weep, and her eyes are more clear. “Like we’re alone, suspending in _nothing_.”

“We don’t know that yet,” Sam says. “We still…we still have a lot to figure out.”

“Should we…try to find food?” Peter asks as he scratches his head.

“Is anyone hungry?” Bucky asks. “Anyone? ‘Cause, I don’t feel hungry at all. It might have been the eighty odd years of cryo, or whatever else happened to me but…”

“No, me too,” Sam says. “I don’t feel anything. Not hungry, but I’m not dizzy or weak either. I’m fine.”

“So we add that to the list,” T’Challa says. “We do not need sustenance, apparently.”

“But we _did_ need to sleep. No food, yes sleep.” Peter scratches his head. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

“We’re missing a piece of the puzzle,” Loki says. “We’re missing something.” He reaches out a hand, tracing it through the dirt next to him. “There’s something we don’t understand yet. A key.” The night’s rest has cleared his mind. Since rising, his mind has turned over and over various magical theories and mythologies, rumors and legends, trying to piece together this non-death they have all found themselves in. So far none of them fit quite right.

“What could we be missing?”

“I don’t know. Not yet. But we might find it if we explore outside the bounds of our clearing.”

“These are the same trees, right? The same as the ones in Wakanda?”

“I believe some of them are,” T’Challa says. “And some aren’t. But it takes the rough shape of the clearing where we last fought.”

“I wish we had a way to write all of this down. Like the boards we were using to find the Stones,” Sam says.

Loki holds out his hands and summons an exact replica of the board from the conference room, down to the notes they had taken on it.

“Nifty.”

It doesn’t last long though and he has to let it drop. “I can’t keep it up. My magic still feels quite strange and we wouldn’t be able to use it to actually write anything down. But I wanted to test it.”

“Okay. Let’s go over some theories.” Sam takes a branch that had fallen on the ground and begun to trace squares in the dirt. “Let’s start with the most hopeful. We’re alive, but just…whatever Thanos did sent us somewhere weird.”

“Like another planet?” Bucky asks.

“Exactly.”

“That would not explain all the evidence,” Loki says. “Why my magic feels strange, or why we do not hunger.”

“Unless there’s something weird about the planet. Some weird vibe.” Peter scratches his head. “Like, Vormir felt super weird. Though I can’t see how that would lead to us not needing food.”

“Two, we’re actually dead.” Sam taps the stick on the ground. “That’s what Thanos wanted, right?”

“I never quite understood _why_ he wanted half the universe dead?” Peter says. “That’s what Gamora would say he wanted but I never got it.”

“He has some…notions…about the equal distribution of suffering and resources.” Loki twists his fingers together, squeezing until his joints ache. “He thought that if he had eliminated half the populations, the remaining would be more prosperous.”

“And he never got how that doesn’t actually make any sense,” Sam says flatly.

“Equally, he felt it would be a grand sacrifice to Death itself. A salvation, both for the living and the dead, whose lives would go towards a grander purpose…” Loki takes a deep breath. “That their deaths would tip the universal scales towards balance…” He trails off. The words are coming from somewhere else. It takes a moment for him to recall but when he does, he can hear the voice of Ebony Maw. _You may think this is suffering_. He clenches his jaw shut. His chest throbs, familiar pain mingled with longing.

“Okay. So we’re going to hope that we’re not dead.” The Valkyrie lets her leg knock against his.

“The third is…” Sam stops. “Something else we haven’t thought of yet.”

“That’s helpful,” Bucky says.

“Hey, I’m doing my best.”

They all agree to take a break, and robotically Loki rises and drifts away. Speaking so plainly of Thanos’s great goal has shaken him. Slipping up and using words that Maw had once used had only reminded him of how insidious Thanos was, how easily he slid under Loki’s skin. How their beliefs had once infected him like a virus. He needs to be alone. The voices of the others, their presence, grates on him.

A little ways into the trees, the Valkyrie catches up. “Hey. Wait, you shouldn’t be wandering off.”

“I want a moment alone, is that too much to ask?” he snaps, and regrets it a moment later.

“I mean, kind of. Right now, yes. Who knows what could happen out here. We have literally no idea what the fuck is going on with this place, we shouldn’t get separated.”

The pain in the center of his chest has gotten worse. It’s a dull throb, just under his breastbone. There’s a brief moment when he’s sure he’s about to wake up in bed, so sure that he’s going to open his eyes to a familiar ceiling, whether it’s on the Ark, or Wakanda, or even the farmhouse in Lithuania that had so briefly served as a refuge. He closes his eyes against the sting.

“Hey. Are you okay?”

“I had forgotten. _Norns_ , I had forgotten for a little while. I let myself have foolish hope. And where did that get us? Here. Straight to Thanos’s victory.” Loki keeps his voice low, so the others won’t hear.

“You can’t be thinking this was your fault.”

Loki laughs bitterly. “No. Thanos was on this path long before I met him. And my failures perhaps set him back, in fact, because I was so useless I lost him the Mind Stone and failed to gain him the Tesseract to boot, but of course I gave him the Tesseract eventually, gave it up willingly because I was unable to watch him torture my brother to death.”

“Loki.”

“And I _tried_ to warn the authorities on Midgard, but of course they didn’t believe me, and instead of acting against Thanos, they locked me away, bound me in a cell where I could not speak or move for months.” Her face drops. Loki sucks in a breath. “So no, it was not my fault, though I failed to prevent it. It is just that the Universe loathes me and perhaps if I had died the first time I tried to take my own life things would have turned out differently. If I had just died when I was supposed to or maybe even before, maybe the bloody Jotnar were right and I am a blight on existence that should have been stamped out, left to freeze on that rock, maybe none of this would have-”

Valkyrie slams him back against a tree. “Stop it. This was not your fault. This is all on _Thanos_. Wherever we are, whatever he’s done, we’re going to find a way to fucking fix it. Got it? And we can’t do that without you. We need you. We all need you. If you’d died before…we wouldn’t have lasted this long against him. You did all you could.”

“I cannot help but think that this end was inevitable.”

“Maybe it was. But that doesn’t mean that we lay down and die now that we’re here.” She softens her grip on his arms. “I know you’re scared. I know that you’re missing-”

“You have no idea what it was like. Midgard. Sanctuary.” Loki’s voice is rough, almost a whisper now. “Sanctuary was a blur. Of pain, Thanos was just tormenting us for the fun of it. Because he’s a sadist and…he may have been trying to break Thor, to send him to retrieve the other Stones, I don’t know. I can only guess at his motivations then, things were foggy. And when we managed to escaped, I tried, I _tried_ to tell them the truth but they wouldn’t listen. They were no better than him, they locked me away and sent Thor out to do their bidding…” He lets out a hysterical laugh. “I did something foolish.”

The Valkyrie’s eyes narrow. “What?”

“I mingled our magics together. It was to keep from going entirely mad. It was…a comfort, I suppose.” He puts a hand to his chest, where the ache has settled. “It was a dangerous, desperate move. But I did it anyways. And…I don’t even know why I’m confessing this to you now. Because it doesn’t matter anymore. Not now anyways.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does. I know that…this is hard for you.” She glances away and then back. She opens her mouth to say something else but before she can, they’re interrupted.

“Hey, guys!” Sam calls. “Wanda says Loki needs to take a look at something.”

When they rejoin the others, all are gathered, staring, at a small circle of gold sprouting between two trees. They are all clearly excited. This is the first thing that has changed since their arrival here.

“Okay, now we’ve got something interesting,” Peter says.

“Be ready,” T’Challa says in warning.

“It feels like magic,” Wanda says. She is crouched by the growing circle, with her hand extended towards it. “But I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Loki comes up behind her and heaves an irritated sigh. “I have.”

The gold circle expands until it is taller than all of them. Through the gold shimmering, dark shapes are forming, growing closer. Some of the others look wary, readying themselves for a fight but Loki waves them off.

“It’s okay,” he says. “They will not attack us.”

Another moment later, and Stephen Strange steps through the portal, followed by four strangers.

“Loki,” he calls with a smile like they’re old friends. “Nice to see you again.”

“Ah, the Earthly sorcerer. I hadn’t figured on meeting you again.” But Loki smiles, finding himself strangely glad to see the familiar face, even if their first meeting had not gone terribly well.

“But I’m sure you’re delighted.” Strange bows his head.

In a second, three of the strangers have tackled Peter, making the group startle but it immediately becomes evident that this is not an attack.

“How the hell did you guys get here?” Peter cries. “And where’s Rocket?”

“We have no idea,” gasps a woman with long black hair and eyes wide with shock. “We all collapsed and woke up in this strange place, but he did not.”

“He is one of the unfortunate half who remain in the world of the living,” Strange says.

“So I was right,” Wanda says bitterly. “We are dead.”

Strange shakes his head. “Not quite.”

Introductions are made. They are filled in on the events of Titan. And then Strange explains where they are.

A stunned silence falls in the wake of his explanation.

“So we’re…what? _Inside_ the Soul Stone?” Sam asks with his head in his hands.

“Not exactly,” Strange explains. “We’re in a pocket dimension _created_ by it. See, Thanos couldn’t just truly kill us all. Well, technically he did if we’re going by a medical definition of death. Our bodies have been destroyed. But he couldn’t just send our souls to their prospective afterlives, or the Void. Not on this scale. So at the moment he snapped his fingers, the Stones worked together to create a pocket dimension. Like storage.”

“Storage. For souls,” Sam says slowly. “This cannot get any weirder.”

“I really wouldn’t say that if I were you,” Bucky warns.

“That…makes sense,” Loki agrees. “That’s…” His mind spins, slotting the evidence they’ve already gathered into Strange’s theory. “You may actually be right.”

“I’m right,” Strange says with confidence.

“So that’s why this place looks like Vormir?”

“Vormir was not just the holding place of the Soul Stone,” the Valkyrie says. “It was rumored to be a haunted place, at the center of death itself. People on Sakaar always spoke of curses, and I thought it was just superstition. When we found the Stone there, I figured that’s what caused it. Like the Stone transformed it.”

“I believe you’re right,” Strange says. “Like the way that the Soul Stone wore away at Vormir over time, Thanos’s snap broke the paradigm between life and death altogether. Ripped open the fabric of the universe. And put us here.”

“Not alive. Not dead. But halfway between. There have long been rumor places of thinness. Places where the divide is blurred. Vormir would have been such a place, if the Soul Stone was acting on it for that long of a time.” Loki runs his fingers through his hair. The Valkyrie looks like she wants to say something, but stays silent. “The Soul Stone was more powerful than we thought, if it was able to create a dimension for billions of souls. To pluck them out of death and hold them here.” _Or perhaps Death itself no longer has any meaning. Perhaps Thanos’s grand sacrifice has unraveled the very essence of life and death itself and soon the fabric of the universe will unravel just the same._ The thought comes to Loki out of no where. Like it was placed there, a whisper. He can hear the faintest drumbeat, but then he thinks it might just be his own pulse. After a moment it stops, and there is no trace of any presence in his mind.

Loki files that away.

“It sounds kind of like it had a mind of its own,” Bucky says.

“Well. That makes sense.” Maybe the Soul Stone itself was what whispered the thought in his mind. A disturbing prospect, but one that Loki does not dismiss.

“Does it?” Sam says. He sounds a bit faint.

“The Stones were always more alive than Thanos judged them,” Loki says. “They are not tools. They cannot merely be forced into doing mortal bidding.” He laughs. “Thanos may have overstepped his reach.”

“And hopefully,” Strange says. “That will be his downfall.”

“Okay, so we’ve figured out where the hell we are,” Bucky says. “So how do we get out? How do we reverse this?”

“I have no idea,” Strange says.

“What do you mean you have no idea?” Peter cries. “You said you had a vision-”

“Yes. I had a vision. It showed me the creation of this dimension but not-”

“Weren’t you supposed to be the keeper of the Time Stone?” Sam interrupts. “Steve and Thor went to warn you about it…” Bucky turns and fixes Strange with an even stare, so direct and piercing that Strange has to look away before he answers.

“I gave it to him.”

“What the _fuck_ , man?” Peter cries.

“Quill,” Drax says. “This man said he saw the future-”

“And you _believed_ him?”

“I _did_ see the future,” Strange says. “I saw many futures. In all of them, we die. We withhold the Stone and Thanos slaughters us all and takes it anyways. We don’t get pulled here, into this dimension. We’re just dead. That’s it, no more chances. My vision showed me that we had to end up here. All of us. That was the only way.”

“So we do have a chance?” T’Challa asks quietly.

Strange shrugs. “I don’t know yet. But I do know that it had to be us and it had to be here. It was the only way.”

Loki stands and starts to pace. His chest has started to ache again, a low throb. “Hm.”

“You look like you have an idea,” Valkyrie says. “That makes me nervous.”

“Not yet.” His mind still spins, testing theories and coming up with explanations that are only half-formed ideas. “But I think Strange might be right. And under a similar circumstance…I would likely have done the same thing.”

“You would have?”

“Well, I gave up a Stone myself, though that was under duress. But what Strange says…it’s logical. Once Thanos had enough Stones, his victory was inevitable. We had already reached the point of no return _long_ before Thanos reached them on Titan. It was probably around when he took the Reality Stone off of them on Knowhere.”

“He had it before we even showed up,” Peter mutters under his breath.

“But perhaps even earlier, when he stole the Power Stone from Xandar and was able to start torturing others off people. Perhaps once he had possessed even a single Stone, it was too late.”

“We’d long reached the tipping point. We could not stop him. No matter how hard we tried. It was never going to be enough,” Strange says. “But there is a way to stop it from here. Somehow. _That’s_ what my vision showed me.”

“Whatever it is, we must be careful,” T’Challa says. “This is dark power. Between life and death…we do not yet know what the consequences of our existence here will be.”

“All power fueled by Death is dark,” Strange says. “But there was no other way.” Loki hums in agreement.

“We need a plan,” Sam says. “We’ll need to explore this place more, we’ll need to gather as much information as we can.”

“Um,” The new Peter says. “Is there anything I can do? To help? I don’t really have magical powers but if we need like…a record keeper or something, I have pretty okay handwriting, I mean it’s nothing great but-”

“Aren’t you like…14?” Sam says. “How the hell did you end up on Titan?”

“Oh, actually I’m 17. I hitched a ride. Mr. Stark followed me, but he didn’t get turned to dust so…he’s alive, I guess.”

“He is,” Strange confirms.

“Fantastic,” Bucky says with a note of sarcasm.

“He should be able to help coordinate the efforts from the other side.” Strange scratches his beard. “Hopefully I wasn’t too cryptic…”

“I am not exactly confident in Stark’s willingness to accept warnings about Thanos,” Loki says coldly.

“But with everything else…maybe he’ll have seen the light,” Sam says. “It’s possible.”

“Or they’ll die on Titan and no one will be any the wiser.” Loki turns at their awkward silence. “What? I’m not allowed a little bitterness? He did help imprison me under fairly _horrific_ circumstances for some time.”

“But he could help save the universe. If he makes it back to Earth,” Strange says.

“Hey, if anyone can get them back to Earth it’s Rocket.”

“I don’t know Quill, we really messed up the ship on our entry into Titan.”

“Drax, _what?_ What the hell did you do to my ship?” The Guardians devolve into an argument about the condition of their ship, and they all take that as a sign that a break is in order. They break off into smaller groups to have low conversations about their predicament.

“So do you believe him?” Valkyrie asks. “You seem like you don’t like him, but that doesn’t really tell me anything about his character. You hate everyone.”

“I do not hate-” Loki sighs. “Fine. I don’t necessarily harbor warm feelings for the mortal sorcerer based on prior interaction. But I do think he’s right. And I’ve never suspected him of working for Thanos. He has no reason to lie to us about his vision.”

Voices from the other conversations filter towards them. Loki’s attention is caught by a name.

“What about Gamora? Did you find any sign of her? Quill?”

Peter hesitates a moment before answering and when he does it sounds strangled. “Yeah. Yeah, Drax…I found…I found her.”

“Oh no,” Mantis gasps.

“I do not understand. You found her? Where? Quill?”

Peter doesn’t answer them. He turns and comes to stand on the Valkyrie’s other side, leaving Mantis to explain. “So. We’re in a pocket dimension. That’s cool. Now how the fuck do we get out of here? Back to the living?”

“I’m sure we will find something in time,” Loki says. “Though I’m trying not to hope too fervently.”

“Hey,” the Valkyrie says. “We’ve got to hope for something. Let’s get to work.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so I might not be reinventing the wheel with the 'they're trapped in the Soul Stone/a pocket dimension' and credit for the general idea should actually go to my brother, who introduced the theory to me the day after I saw _Infinity War_ in 2018. I hope it all eventually...makes some sort of sense. They're never going to quite have all the answers, as it's been suggested there are greater powers at work so...yeah, use that excuse as you will to fix any spots I've slipped up. (I mean, I've done my best, but I'm sure there are going to be plot holes in there...) 
> 
> Ack, I said I wasn't going to do stuff like that. To excuse it. Just going to let it stand. Anyways! Next week, we'll be back in New York, catching up with the apocalypse. 
> 
> As usual, kudos/comments/shares/frogs always appreciated! [Come hang with me on tumblr for further shenanigans.](https://bereft-of-frogs.tumblr.com/) Happy Friday, everybody! See you next week! ;-)


	4. What Remains

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Apocalypse continues. Help arrives from another world, but so does conflict.

_“She was thinking about the way she’d always taken for granted that the world would have certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees.”_

_-Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven_

_“We still have no official - uh, no official statement from the White House, nor any indication that one is forthcoming. We’ll keep updating but at this point, I’m sorry to say we have no new information.”_

Click.

_“Fire crews are still working on the largest fires, but do not have the manpower to tackle smaller fires in the area. Volunteers are working in a few counties to prevent spread but unfortunately we’re going to be looking at significant property damage and displaced people over the coming days. A temporary shelter is-”_

Click.

_“Some countries are beginning to release numbers, with caution that the numbers may not be entirely accurate for some time.”_

Click.

_“We have no way of knowing if the president is even still alive, or the governor, what are we supposed to do in this situation?”_

_“Robert, I don’t think we should panic, we have had an official statement from the mayor insisting that people stay in their homes and wait to get word-”_

_“And if word never comes? Jesus Christ, what the fuck are we supposed to do in this situation?”_

_“Robert, you’re going to get us fined-”_

_“If anyone at the goddamn FCC is still alive, you mean.”_

Click.

It starts to rain. To pour, come down in sheets. One news station says it’s probably a good thing.

_“The rain will help with fire prevention and suppress the dust clouds that have been clogging the air. There has been some concern expressed about possible health dangers associated with breathing in the dust and we’re…we’re not sure quite yet, but early statements from the WHO have said there is no need for masks. The rain should last at least through the next couple days, we’re working on getting our full meteorological team in but with the traffic and transportation conditions, they’re having a bit of trouble. We’re not expecting any major winds or flooding, but we’ll have more updates on this as soon as we can.”_

Click.

_“I told you this would happen, I warned you that this conspiracy-”_

_“Be reasonable-”_

_“The Sokovia Accords didn’t go far enough, didn’t protect us, and you know it-”_

Click.

_“We’ve just had word that our evening anchor, David, has not survived, our thoughts are with his remaining family…”_

“Jesus, Nat, turn it off,” Clint finally moans. He doesn’t look up from where his head is buried in his hands. Thor looks away from the window, where he has been watching the rain fall. Natasha says nothing in response, just flips the channel again, to two drawn and exhausted anchors are dissecting word for word the only official federal announcement they have - a statement from the director of FEMA. It explains that they have many contingency plans for various different disasters, but this is unprecedented and people would have to be patient while they figured out precise logistics. There had been no other statements. No one wanted to come out and address the public when they still have only questions and no answers.

“Come on, Nat. Turn it off, you’re not going to find anything useful from the news.”

“It’s important that we’re informed.”

“This isn’t _information_ ,” Clint spits. “It’s fucking _imagination_. They have no idea what’s going on. Steve’s the one that knows anything, getting the numbers of the dead in there. These assholes are just speculating. They’re just taking fucking stabs in the dark.”

“And it’s important for us to know what stabs they’re taking. They’re a measure of how people feel. That’s going to be important. If there’s panic, if there’s going to be unrest or violence, we’ll be able to see the start of it here.” She gestures at the TV with the remote.

“It’s going to drive me crazy.” Clint’s voice is raw. “I’m going outside.”

“It’s raining,” Natasha points out. Clint doesn’t respond, just steps outside the side door onto the porch and out of sight. Natasha doesn’t take her eyes off the screen. She flips the channel again and it lands on the Weather Channel. She glances at Thor. “The rain’s not you, right?”

Thor shakes his head. “No. Not me. Just rain. And I apologize, I have not the power to make it stop. I can only banish storms I summon myself, not the ones crafted by nature.”

“Well. Like they said, it’s probably a good thing. Maybe it will put out some of the smaller fires. Keep them from spreading at least. And what they said about the dust…even if there are no health risks, I don’t really want to breathe that stuff in. Never been squeamish around dead bodies…but breathing them in is really crossing a line. Right. Sorry.” She glances at Thor again. “You don’t think they’re dead.”

Thor sighs. “True. I do not believe…” He squeezes a hand into fist. “But either way…what remains…this dust is their bodies. You are right about that. In the clearing, I felt that I couldn’t leave because…” His eyes sting. “I thought about trying to gather it up, but I realized that I’d have no way of separating it all from the dirt, or being sure I had gathered it all and I could not just leave…parts…” He trails off, looking back out the windows. “And I suppose it is as good a resting place as any that I can give.”

Natasha says nothing. The rain lashes at the windows. They lapse into silence as Natasha continues to flip through news channels.

Finally, she turns off the TV. “I think I’ve seen enough for now. I’m going to check in on Steve.”

“May I come with you?” Thor has little desire to be alone at the moment. Alone, there is too much space for his mind to turn towards what’s missing.

“‘Course.”

They find Steve leaning on the table, as a screen projects numbers of the dead, country by country. Many haven’t yet been heard from, a little _n/a_ showing below instead of a number.

“Hey.” Natasha sits in the desk chair next to him. Thor goes to lean against the wall. “How’s it going?”

Steve sighs heavily. “The numbers are staggering. But we expected that.”

“50%” Thor says.

“Any more word from Wakanda yet? Any idea where Thanos could have gone?”

“Nothing yet,” Steve says. “And nothing yet from that.” He nods at the pager they’d found in Fury’s wrecked car. “It’s still signaling but I have no idea who - or what - it’s calling. They’re not having any more luck either. Thor, you said you recognized some of the work on it?”

“Yes, the modifications look to be Kree in origin. Possibly the symbol as well. And I find it hard to believe that Fury would-”

There’s a buzz, the front gates. Natasha pulls up the screen. It’s Rhodes. “Hey guys, I’m back. Nothing else to do out here, thought I’d come to help you all.”

“I’ll buzz you in.” She enters the code and dismisses the screen. “Sorry, you were saying?”

“I don’t know that Fury would have contacted the Kree.” Thor shakes his head. “They are a conquering empire, it would be dangerous for a planet of Earth’s size and defense capabilities to risk drawing the Kree’s attention here. Earth is far, yes, under the purview of Asgard as part of the Nine,and perhaps insignificant enough to avoid notice…but for Fury to possess their technology, not to tell anyone…I do not understand his thinking.”

“Fury had a lot of secrets. Didn’t share much. I missed a lot, when I was in the ice.”

“He didn’t tell me anything about this either. And here I thought I knew most of his secrets.”

“I don’t think any of us have even skimmed the surface of Fury’s secrets,” Steve says.

Natasha goes to stand by the pager, staring at it like it could start talking to her and give her the answers.

“Do you think the Kree could attack us?” Steve asks. “Should we trying and turn the signal off?”

“Do they have the power and capability to? Yes. But they have also lost half their population. If they’re as bad off as we are, it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to do anything substantial now. That will be more of a-” Thor realizes what he’s about to say the moment before it’s out of his mouth. He scrubs a hand over his beard.

“What?” Steve asks.

“That will likely be more of a long term problem.” _Long term_. Like he’s acknowledging the fact that this will be a _long term_ situation. A stabbing, aching pain in his chest begins to throb. _Long term_. He’s lost everything…for the long term. He forces himself to set it aside. “They’ll likely recover faster than Earth will, with how much more technologically advanced they are. I do not know what they’d want to do, if they’d want to conquer Earth. It is a possibility. There’s no more…there’s no more Asgard, no more Nova Corps. Others will be collapsing as we speak…”

“Leaving a power vacuum,” Natasha says. “That people will be looking to fill. This empire might look to take advantage.”

“So should we try to turn it off?” Steve frowns at the device. “If we don’t know what it will bring? Could be more trouble.”

“But Fury turned it on,” Natasha says. “Fury must have had a reason. This was the last thing he did…he _had_ to have a reason.”

Rhodes enters. “Hey.”

“Welcome back.” Steve gives him a nod. “Pepper okay?”

“She’s fine. Upset, freaked out, just like the rest of us, but…fine, all things considered. She said Tony disappeared after the ships appeared in the sky. He went after them, no one’s seen him since.” Rhodes leans against the table. “I checked the place on Bleecker. Wong said he was going back to protect it but…it’s wrecked. No one there, except well…”

“Ashes?” Natasha asks. Rhodes nods. “Shit.”

“Thanks for checking. I didn’t expect much but…I’d hoped…”

“Especially since we know that somehow Thanos acquired the Time Stone,” Thor says. “I expect that Strange was dead long before the end.” Thor sighs. “Unfortunately that is the end of the list of people I know who can wield magic. We’ll have no help in that arena.”

“And we’re thinking Tony’s probably dead too, right?” Natasha says quietly.

Rhodes sighs. “I don’t know. Pepper had no idea. But maybe…as long as the phone lines stay open, and the power stays on…maybe…” He leans against the desk. “I don’t know.”

“We can’t count on him. Or anyone.” Steve clasps his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.”

“Uh, guys,” Natasha stands up straighter. She takes a step towards the device. “It’s stopped.” The words _no signal detected_ float over the pager.

“What did you do?” Steve asks.

“Nothing.” She holds up her hands. “I didn’t touch it. It turned off on its own.”

“Could it have timed out?” Rhodes asks.

“I don’t know. Maybe? It’s been going for a while now, why would it just turn off by itself?”

“I have no idea,” Thor says, leaning closer. “Maybe it got an answer.” An ominous idea.

There’s a footstep behind them. Clint coming in from the rain.

“I don’t know. Shit.” Natasha starts typing, trying to see if any of their analysis or tracking programs had completed. “I’m not getting any outside readings though, so there’s no response coming in.”

Steve stands next to her, peering over her shoulder. “Okay, we need to figure out-”

“Uh, excuse me,” A female voice says behind them. Not Clint.

They all spin around at the ready. Thor brings bolts of lighting to his hands, Nat produces a pistol from somewhere. But the stranger, a blonde woman, dressed in a red and blue suit and wearing a jacket over it, holds up her hands in surrender. She looks stern, wide eyed with worry, but nonthreatening.

“Hi. I’m looking for Nick Fury?”

The newcomer’s name is Carol.

Once everyone gets over their shock, they settle in one of the cozier offices and start working through their stories. It takes the better part of the night to get through everything, to catch Carol up the whole Thanos affair, what they know about what he’s done. Carol confirms what they believed about the rest of the universe, that the chaos they’re seeing on Earth is matched elsewhere. She does bring somewhat good news, that no one’s in any shape to go on a conquering mission right now.

They also learn a great deal about Nick Fury. The revelation of how he lost his eye is met with stunned silence, then several minutes of delirious laughter.

It’s nearly four in the morning when they finish, when they’re all finally on the same page about what happened.

“Okay, so what are we going to _do?”_ Carol asks. “What’s the plan?”

“We’re…working on it,” Steve admits. “We’ve been on damage control.”

“We need to find a way to reverse what Thanos did,” Clint says. He’s been pretty quiet since he came in from the rain. “We have to.”

“And kill him, preferably,” Rhodes says.

“I am certainly in favor of killing him,” Thor says.

“Excellent,” Carol says firmly. “When do we start?”

“We’re still working on tracing him,” Steve says. “We’ve got a team in Wakanda that are working on it. We can figure out a more detailed plan once we actually figure out where he is.”

“There’s always the old fashioned way. We can go looking for him. Or I can go. I don’t necessarily need you all to come. I can kill Thanos myself if I have to.”

“Look, lady, I don’t know who the fuck you are-”

“What Colonel Rhodes is trying to say,” Natasha cuts him off. “Is that you’re talking a big game for someone we’ve never met before. For someone who wasn’t here to help stop it.”

Carol turns to Natasha. “Oh, if I were here, I could have stopped it.”

Natasha holds her gaze. “But you weren’t here.”

“I had…bigger fish to fry, it’s a big universe out there-”

“There is no ‘bigger fish’,” Thor says. “There is nothing more important than _this_. Do you understand? None of the petty galactic squabbling matters anymore. The Kree, the Nova Corps, Nine…Thanos has wiped them all out equally. There is nothing else anymore.”

Silence falls for a few minutes.

“Fifty percent,” Natasha says under her breath. Her gaze is distant. “Fuck. It’s really the end of the world.”

“What do you mean?” Clint asks.

“The death toll’s at fifty percent at the baseline. The real total’s going to be a lot higher, we’ve already see that.” Natasha toys a lock of her hair. “The news stations showed the fires, car crashes, plane crashes. The death toll’s going to keep climbing. And it’s going to get a lot worse.”

“People won’t have food,” Rhodes picks up. “The supply chains aren’t going to be able to keep up. People are going to die because they don’t have enough food, because they can’t access their medications, because they can’t see a doctor.”

Natasha nods. “I’ve seen it happen, in countries where the societal structure suddenly fails. When support networks suddenly drop out from beneath people. They can rebuild, yes, but it takes time and patience and a lot of people don’t survive the process. And that’s with the death toll being _way_ less than fifty percent. This, and on a universal scale?”

“We’re fucked,” Carol says quietly. Clint silently gets up and leaves the room.

“All the more reason, to keep working until we can figure out how to fix this,” Steve says. “We’re the Avengers. People are going to be counting on us. So let’s not let them down.” Steve’s words are half to himself. Like a mantra that if he says enough he’ll actually believe. He sighs heavily. “We should try and get some sleep. Tackling everything with clear heads in the morning.”

They all agree. They rise, stretch out stiff limbs.

“Hey, can I borrow a phone?” Carol asks. They stare back at her. “The phones still work, right? I lost my last like, regular Earth phone, but if they still work-”

“Sure, space girl, you can have mine.” Rhodes unlocks his phone and pulls up the keypad, then hands it over. Carol hangs back as they all step into the hall. She dials a number.

“Come on, pick up, pick up, pick up…” She whispers into the air as the dial tone sounds. Despite the early hour, she know’s they’ll pick up. With everything that’s going on, they’ll be waiting to here from her.

“ _Heyyy,_ ” comes the familiar drawl of Monica’s voice. The message had been recorded, through giggles, when Monica was 13. It hadn’t been changed since. “ _You’ve reached the Rambeaus, leave a message._ ”

“Shit.” She hangs up without leaving a message and tries the cell phone number Maria had given her a years ago.

“We barely use the house phone anymore,” Maria had said. “Just text me.”

“Text? Really? Okay.” Carol said with a skeptical grin as she took the new cell phone. One that she’d lost, at some point. She thinks it might have been in that swamp on PX149. It had taken weeks to wash the smell of that swamp out of her hair and she never saw the phone after that.

This one goes straight to voicemail. “ _You’ve got Maria, leave a message and I’ll get back to you._ ”

Carol hangs up. She goes out into the hall to find Rhodes waiting and hands the phone back. “Thanks.”

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah, sure,” she nods. “Time to fix this.”

They all spread out, claiming bedrooms and couches and crash. They only get a couple hours of sleep though, when they are all woken by a shrill, panicked beeping alarm ringing throughout the compound.

The corset pinches. Shuri hadn’t wanted to wear it. She never wants to wear it, in truth, but she wants to wear it now least of all.

They at least listen when she does away with the majority of the ceremony.

There is no dancing. There is no procession. The survivors meet at the falls, and stare down at her in silence. No Challengers step forward. It is not a Challenge. It is a vigil.

She had hoped M’Baku would at least challenge her reign. She thinks she might have given the throne to him without a fight, if he had. But he just meets her eye and says absolutely nothing. She stares back, daring him to speak. Nothing.

The water rushes over the cliff. Finally, when the sun has almost entirely set and the sky is streaked with orange and red light, Shuri turns away from the silent stares and walks away.

In the temple, the women bury her in the warm red sand. All goes dark.

When she opens her eyes, she is on a wide, dark plain and she is alone. Shuri gets to her feet and looks around.

“Hello?” She calls and it echoes out over the empty landscape. This place feels wrong. Alien and hostile. The wind picks up, howling over the sands.

T’Challa had returned from this place in wonder. He had been doubtful before his coronation, but when he emerged he spoke of seeing and speaking to their father. He had been awed and humbled by the experience.

There are no ancestors here now to give her advice, share the wisdom of their reigns. She sits down on the ground and waits for her time in this plain to be over.

She brushes aside the red dust and says nothing to the attendants on her way out of the temple.

None of actually mattered. It was all just a formality. A ritual that they were following out of habit and fear for the future. It was a way to cling to the past, to certainty, when everything else was falling apart.

Shuri is queen and she never expected it to feel so hollow. She thought she would feel _something_. But now she’s only numb.

Shuri meets with her council for the first time. The half that remains spends the full hour talking over each other and shouting about what needs to be done. Her mother says nothing, just watches the proceedings with a pinched mouth and narrowed eyes.

Shuri watches the clock. When the hour is up she rises. “I agree that we should close the borders, keep them secure. Tell everyone to stay inside if possible. The cleanup crews are almost done clearing the bodies from the field. They will work through the night, to finish before the decay can get any worse.” The bodies had spent a full day lying in the sun. The fields must be almost unbearable.

“What of…what of the rest?” The fallen dust that coats everything.

“In the city, gather it up. If it has fallen on dirt, well,” She looks out at the small council. “We’ll leave them there. Return them to the earth.” Out of the corner of her eye, she sees her mother nod.

They still stare at her expectantly. They are waiting for her to say something about reversing the effects of Thanos’s actions. She has nothing to offer them, so she says, “That’s it,” and walks out of the room.

She feels their eyes on her back.

Shuri returns to the lab, her own domain. It seems like such a long time ago that they were all gathered here, planning for Thanos, back when her tech and her science were all that she had to worry about. She’s always hated politics.

Bruce Banner and Jane Foster are still in the conference room, watching death tolls climb on a screen. Jane is glancing between that screen and a laptop that is displaying some sort of radiation sensor.

“Hey,” Jane says when she enters. “How’d everything go?”

“Fine,” she says, but the image of the empty plain pops into her mind. “Have you heard from the others?”

“Yeah, got a message from them a while ago. They’ve made it to New York okay,” Bruce says. “The Avengers compound is intact. They’re safe there for now.”

“I’m still working on tracing Thanos. I think I was able to isolate a signature from the stones, I’m scanning now but…I’m honestly pretty limited. Just trying to work with what I’ve got but the range…I can only scan so far with what we’ve got on Earth.”

“I managed to get back in contact with the Asgardian ship. We’re working on uploading Jane’s tracer to them, that will give us a pretty good booster but there’s a significant lag time in the upload speeds. We just have to be patient.” Bruce scrubs a hand over his face. “Half the population. Jesus. It really is half the population.” The screen displaying the aggregated death toll clicks towards 3 billion.

“So when you do fine him,” Shuri sits on the table. “What are you going to do? Is this revenge or a solution?”

“I wouldn’t get your heart set on a solution,” Jane says gently. “Maybe, maybe if we can somehow get control of the stones…but…we’d barely know where to begin.”

“So it is a revenge mission.”

“Honestly, it’s just _something_. Because I think if we just sat around and thought about the scale of the destruction, we’d all go insane.” Jane sighs. “It’s absolutely nuts. I’ve been to afraid to see who I know is even left.”

“Do you know what Thor said?”

They exchange a glance. “Yes,” Jane says. “I do. I didn’t want to…he’s lost so much…”

Bruce looks stricken. “I think Thor really, really wants to believe in something right now.”

“So you think he is delusional?”

“I don’t know. I can’t say for sure because…yeah I saw some really mad things traveling with them. You know, you learn that gods are real and they’re aliens and you kind of start rationalizing everything, right?” He looks at Jane and she nods. “You start trying to apply scientific explanations to everything because obviously, it’s not _really_ magic if it’s all real? It’s just…”

“Science that we can’t explain yet.”

“Exactly. It’s just our ancestors seeing things they didn’t understand and coming up with an explanation that made sense to their limited worldview. Except.” Bruce takes a deep breath. “Except there are things that even science can’t explain. And there are things that are bigger than we can ever understand. And I saw real fucking magic out there. I was traveling through the stars on a _spaceship_ and there was _real magic_.”

“So what are you trying to say?” Shuri tries to keep the hope out of her voice but that just makes it sound scraped raw.

“I don’t know, I don’t know what I’m trying to say. Just that, we should be careful. Cautiously-maybe-optimistic. We shouldn’t believe what Thor says outright, but I wouldn’t count him out either. Considering he can see the future and all.”

Jane looks up from the laptop. “He can _what_.”

“Oh, you didn’t know that? Yeah, he can like…see things before they happen. Have cryptic dreams that reveal hidden knowledge. All that jazz.” Jane is still staring at him like he has two heads. Bruce holds up his hands. “I’m not saying that’s what’s happening now. I still do think that it’s mostly grief but…maybe he does know something we don’t.”

“Huh.”

“So for now…”

“We stay cautiously not entirely given up yet,” Bruce says. “But not really hopeful either. No one’s ready to give up. But we should be realistic about our chances.”

“I can accept that,” Shuri says. “Fine.” She takes a deep breath. “We’re closing the borders soon. We need to get a handle on control sooner rather than later. I’d advise you stay inside the lab for now.”

“That makes sense.”

“If you need anything, just let someone know and they will fetch it for you. If you need me, likewise. Or if…if…”

“If we have good news, we’ll tell you right away,” Bruce says gently.

“Good. Thank you.” She absentmindedly fiddles with the hem of her formal shirt. She wants to get out of these clothes. She wants to sleep for days. She wants to go back to experimenting in her lab, not running the country.

She mostly wants to scream, but she can’t do that. Instead she nods again and turns towards the door.

“Hey,” Jane says. “You’re doing a good job.”

Shuri pauses at the door. “I’d rather not be doing this job at all.” And she leaves them to their fruitless searching before she can embarrass herself by crying.

Thor is dreaming when the siren starts blaring. He jolts awake and immediately reaches to his side. Loki is not there. Thor sits up abruptly, panicked, ready to go looking for him, before it all crashes back together and he remembers what happened. The grief is as piercing as it had been the first time, a solid stab to the chest.

The shrill alarm still blares. He gets out of bed, pulling on boots, and rushes out the door.

He runs into Natasha first. “What’s going on?”

“No clue.”

They make their way to the control room, where they find Steve and Rhodes, still bleary eyed with sleep, standing before the screen that had a few hours earlier been counting the rolls of the dead.

“What’s that?” Carol stumbles in after them. Clint joins a few seconds later.

“I think it’s..a distress signal.”

“Is there any way to shut it off? Given that it is very annoying?” Carol scans the displays, looking for a shutoff.

Rhodes hits a few buttons. The beeping silences and a text stream appears. “Holy shit, guys. Holy _shit_.” The computer chimes. Something - a message, data - has been received.

“Oh my God,” Steve says.

Tony is alive. Tony is drifting in a damaged spacecraft a long, long way from Earth. He is not alone. They’re working on fixing it, but the power cells are failing and they won’t last long. They’ve had to shut most systems down to focus on life-support. Messages are short and text-based, though Tony transmits a single recording meant for Pepper, ‘if the worst happens.’ The messages are also one-way, so they can’t tell Tony that his messages are being received.

“They’re just floating in the dark,” Natasha says as she looks through the maintenance logs. “Sending out blind messages in the hopes one of us is alive to receive them. Jesus Christ.”

“Grim,” Clint agrees.

A lot of what Tony says doesn’t make any sense. Weird things about raccoons and wizards.

“It looks like they’ve pulled back their oxygen production to the lowest possible levels to conserve power,” Rhodes says. “Could be hypoxia causing an altered mental status? Maybe he’s injured?”

“He didn’t say anything about injuries,” Natasha says. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s not, you know Tony.”

“Wait,” Carol nudges Natasha out of the way to look through the logs. She goes back further. “Yup. There’s a lot of logs here about docking on Xandar. The Nova Corps had sort of a deal with this group. Called themselves the ‘Guardians of the Galaxy.’ One of them was a hybrid born out of some seriously unethical experimentation.”

“What, a talking raccoon?”

“Exactly. If I remember correctly, I think his name is Rocket.”

“And we already know the wizard,” Steve says. “He must mean Strange. They disappeared around the same time, they must have both been taken by those black ships.”

“So Tony’s not going crazy?”

Thor thumbs through the messages. “That one. Not _a_ nebula. _Nebula_. Nebula is her name.”

“You know her?” Carol asks.

“Not quite. I didn’t think she was still alive.” Thor declines to comment further.

Based on the maintenance logs, it’s clear that the ship is unsalvageable. They need to mount a rescue mission.

Thor could be there in a moment, transport them back with the bifrost generated by Stormbreaker. It would be challenging, and he’s honestly not completely sure he can hit a moving target so precisely, but it would be the most expedient way to rescue the stranded three, though their ship would be lost. He still hesitates for a moment, feeling an absurd bitterness towards Tony that he knows is unhelpful. If there were ever a time to set aside past grievances it was now, and he feels horribly guilty the second he thinks to refuse to help.

Just as he opens his mouth to volunteer, Carol nods and saves him. “I’m on it. My ship is all fueled up, and she's pretty fast, I can be there way before their supplies run out. I can tow them back, so we’ll have the ship as well. No big deal.”

“We’ll go with you,” Rhodes says, like he still doesn’t quite trust her.

She shrugs. “Sure thing. I’ve got the room. Anyone else?”

Thor and Steve exchange a look. Natasha sits down.

“Come on, guys,” Rhodes says sadly. “He’ll be glad to see you.”

“I really don’t think he will,” Steve responds. Thor says nothing, not trusting his own mouth not to spill something unfairly bitter.

“You really think after all this, he’s not going to want to see you? That this fight isn’t going to be set aside for _this?”_

“Go,” Steve says gently. “Go. We’ll hold down the home fort. Bring him home.”

Rhodes nods. “Alright. We’ll be back.” He turns and follows Carol out. Before the door swings shut, they hear him say, “So I’ve never actually been to space before, I hope you’re as good a pilot as you say you are.”

“Don’t worry,” she responds. “I’ve got plenty of barf bags on board. Hey, just a question, do you like cats?”

“So things really got that bad?” Clint asks once they’re alone. “The last couple years, you really think Stark is really going to be pissed at us?”

Thor remembers the look of disappointment in Tony’s eyes, every time he saw him after he had them locked away on the Raft. He says nothing.

“I don’t know,” Steve sighs.

“We should probably try to get a bit more sleep,” Natasha says. “It’ll be a few hours before they’re back.” Clint nods. They both move to head back to bed, but Thor and Steve don’t move.

“I doubt I will be able to get back to sleep now,” Thor says. “I’m going to stay up.”

“Same,” Steve says. “Mind the company?”

“Not at all.”

Natasha and Clint go off to rest, leaving them sitting in the quiet of the empty conference room. It’s quite for a good long time, each of them lost in thought.

Finally, Steve laughs. “I can’t say I’m not anxious about seeing Tony again. Not after how things ended between us. I know it’s ridiculous, I know the world’s ending and all that shit we were fighting about doesn’t really matter right now but…this is going to be an awkward reunion.”

“It will be indeed.”

Steve glances at him. “Are you still angry?”

Thor takes a deep breath before answer, gathering his thoughts. “I am,” he says quietly. “You are right. It is time to set aside differences to focus on this greater purpose but…I cannot deny that yes, I am still very angry. Especially now that…” He stops to clear his throat. “I find myself feeling even more angry that he robbed me of so much time with my brother, and that he did not listen to our warnings before it was too late. I do not know if it would have changed the outcome but…”

“It might have,” Steve says.

“Yes. And now we’ll never know. And I’ll never get that time back.” Thor sits back, runs his hand over his hair. “By the time they arrive back, I’m sure I will have found it in myself to set aside my feelings. Or at least I will try to keep up the appearance of it, so we may focus on the more pressing crisis.”

“Yeah. I’m going to do the same.” Steve stares hard at the floor. “It felt for a minute there that all our problems from before just went away. Shit, we’re still going to have to deal with all of this. It’s probably going to get _worse_ , if this keeps going. As governments start to recover and start to restore order. Crack down. We might find they’re going to double down even harder on the Accords.”

Thor thinks then that if that becomes the case, he’s going to flee. He doesn’t know where. But he has Stormbreaker, he can go anywhere in the universe he likes. If this is not fixable, he thinks he will flee.

_You have such loyalty to this world. For what? The affections of a few? Thousand year old prayers? What is the point of all of it?_

Thor had pushed back, when Loki questioned his loyalty to Earth. Now, he has the urge to flee it. The next moment he feels guilty again, looking at Steve staring a hole into the carpet. Guilty that he would think of abandoning Steve and the others when they need him most. That seems to be the cycle his emotions have gotten stuck in. A flash of anger, of grief, of panic - and then immediate accompanying guilt.

“I was so close,” Steve says quietly. “I almost had him.”

Guilt, flooding him. “Me too. And we failed. But I suppose that’s all we’re good for. To avenge. Take revenge. I’ve never been good at anything else.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

They lapse back into a grim silence.

Steve was right. It _is_ an awkward reunion.

Carol tows their ship with her own, and the morning after she and Rhodes set out they return, with Tony, a tall woman with blue skin and mechanical features, and a raccoon. One that walks and talks and gets into an animated, highly technical conversation about repairs with Carol almost as soon as they’ve landed.

“Huh. He really wasn’t lying about the raccoon thing,” Natasha says as they watch the group disembark.

It takes Thor a second to recognize Nebula. He still does not remember the night he and Loki had escaped Sanctuary. Their eyes meet for a second and they look away. Nebula slips away, going to start helping Rocket assess repairs.

“Is this really everyone?” Tony asks with a ruined voice. His clothes are singed and bloodstained. His face looks ragged.

“Bruce and Jane Foster are alive too. But yeah,” Steve says. “This is everyone.”

Tony looks away, scrubs at his beard with a shaking hand.

“Come on,” Rhodes pulls him away. “Pepper’s waiting on videochat.”

They let Tony talk to Pepper and clean up. They meet back in their usual conference room. The air feels tense, but perhaps that is only Thor’s own anxiety lending more strain to the atmosphere than exists in reality. There’s an awkward silence as Tony watches some of their collected footage of the destruction on Earth. Rhodes had managed to fill him in on most of the details, but he still looks grave as he watches the way the bodies turn to dust.

“Tony,” Steve finally breaks the tense silence. “What happened out there? Is there anything you can tell us that can help us defeat him?”

“Defeat him? Well. Too late.”

Steve tenses. “Come on, we’ve got to come up with something.”

“We’ve been working on tracing the Stones,” Natasha says. “Bruce and Jane are in Wakanda, they think they’re starting to narrow down the frequency-”

“Ha,” Tony laughs without humor. “Wakanda. So that’s where you’ve all been. Damn. I should have known.”

“It was the only safe place that we could work on a plan to defeat Thanos,” Natasha says, keeping her gaze level and piercing. Thor stands up, goes to lean against the wall behind where Clint sits.

Tony’s gaze flits to him and then quickly away. “Well, guess that didn’t work either. None of what we did worked, we didn’t…we lost. That’s it. Time to admit it. I fought him. I could see that there’s no winning against this guy. It’s over.”

“Newsflash, Tony, we _all_ fought him. And we all lost.” Natasha slaps her hand on the table. “We need a way forward.”

“Yes, and the way forward is getting used to our new reality, not gambling it all on a fool’s hope.”

“What, you’re just giving up?” Steve sounds incredulous. “Tony, come on, you know we can still-”

“Still what, Cap? Still throw ourselves at him, get knocked down again? What more do you want to lose, huh? Face it. It’s _over_. We just need to…move on.”

“Tony, there is no _moving on_.” Steve leans forward. “Don’t you get it? We did our best to prevent it, and we failed, but now the time’s to regroup and try again. We can’t give up, Tony. You’re better than this.”

“How would you know? How would you know what I was better than? ‘Cause you weren’t here. You were the one who split. You weren’t here to see how we tried our best, you weren’t here to-”

“We all tried our best,” Natasha says. “We were all _trying_ , Tony.”

“You were the ones who chose to defend murderers instead of doing the right thing-”

“Fuck, Tony,” Steve says, exasperated. “I chose to protect my friend, who needed my help-”

“This is bullshit,” Tony laughs again. “This is all absolute bullshit. You still think you were doing the right thing, are you fucking serious?”

“This isn’t the time for this, guys-”

Tony cuts off Rhodes. “Where the fuck were you, Cap? I said this would happen, I said we needed a suit of armor around the world to protect us, whether it impacted our precious freedoms or not.”

Thor balls his hand into a fist. Outside the window, there’s a flash of lightning in the stormy sky. Tony glances nervously out the window.

“Tony,” Steve says. “You have to see that the Sokovia Accords weren’t going to save us against Thanos. They were going to hold us back more, and yes, they were going to violate our freedoms.”

“I said-”

“You were not the only one to speak warnings of Thanos,” Thor says. His voice is low but stills the room like he had shouted. It is the voice of a king. “You distrusted our warnings because of your beliefs about my brother’s magic and his intentions.”

“What was I supposed to think? Last I saw, your brother was on Thanos’s side. What the hell was I supposed to think? For all I knew, he was a spy-”

“I will not continue to hear this slander!” A low rumble of thunder sounds outside. Thor takes a deep breath, steadying his temper. “You had no idea what you were up against. You were like children, letting yourself get misdirected at every turn. You could have at least believed _me_ , when _I_ told you something was coming.”

“I did my best, what more was I supposed to do?”

“You were too arrogant, you and all your politicians who just wanted the illusion of control, wanted _things_ to use for your own power, without ever considering the bigger picture.”

“Hey, notice that when you escaped, I didn’t go after you. I could have, I could have tried way harder to find you-”

“And what? Drag me back into a cell and murder my brother?” A spark of lightning travels down Thor’s arm, followed by another. He fights to control himself.

“Yeah,” Clint says, leaning back in his chair. “I hope you can see why you probably shouldn’t expect gratitude for that one.”

“Your suit of armor around the world, it wouldn’t have protected us from Thanos, Tony. It wouldn’t have.” Steve says calm. “In fact, everything you did - everything _I_ did - all our mistakes just contributed to Thanos winning. You’re right. I fucked up. I fucked everything up, and now I’ve lost _everything_.” Steve’s voice cracks. He clears his throat. “I know you’re upset and hurting, we all are. Just like we all made mistakes. We all should have been better to each other, we all should have acted before the end. But now we have to face facts. So we lost. What next?”

“There is no _next_.”

“Come on, Tony.”

“You’re not going to convince me that we should gamble what we have left. We’re not going to learn from our mistakes, we don’t need to…I don’t know, come together and hold hands and sing ‘Kumbaya.’ We’re not going to save the day this time. There’s not going to be any children singing, or fucking ticker tape parades. There’s not going to be an annual holiday to celebrate our triumph. What we need to do - what the whole world needs to do - is to learn to live with our losses. We need to grieve and move on-”

“Hang on a second,” Clint says. “Who did you lose, exactly? Not to turn it into a competition or anything but honestly…” Tears are sparkling in his eyes. “The way I’m looking at it, the rest of us lost… _everything_. My whole family, man. We were having a picnic. It was a sunny day and then I was just alone in a fucking field. I turned my back for a second and when I turned back they were all ashes.” He wipes at his face. “Jesus, Steve’s lost, what? All of your friends? Hell, I _hated_ Loki but I can respect he was the only family Thor had left. And there are billions of people like us. Who haven’t got anything left to live for. And you? Pepper’s still alive. Rhodey here’s still alive. It looks to me like you don’t want to gamble what _you_ still have. Which man, I get it. If I still had my girls, yeah, I might think twice about risking them. But I would still do the right thing.”

“Don’t tell me I haven’t lost anything,” Tony says. “I lost the kid.”

It takes everyone a second to think of who he’s talking about. Steve gets there first. “Shit. That kid from Queens? Parker?”

“Called himself Spiderman,” Natasha says. “But he wasn’t even out of high school.”

“How did he even get involved in this whole thing in the first place?” Steve’s measured calm is gone. “You. You brought him into this fight.”

“Don’t you dare say it’s my fault he’s gone.”

“No, you’re right. It’s Thanos’s fault he’s gone. And if you actually felt any sort of _responsibility_ , you would be just as desperate to fix things as the rest of us are,” Steve continues. “This is your choice, Tony.”

“And you’re choosing to cover your own ass. You’re trying to shove off the blame, to Steve, to Thor, to fucking Loki, when he’s _dead_. You’re choosing to give up on the kid-”

“I’m choosing to protect what I have left.” Tony slams his hand on the table and stands up, knocking his chair back. “What’s so wrong about that?”

“Nothing, man,” Clint says. “Nothing. But it’s going to come at the expense of the rest of the fucking world.”

“The rest of the universe,” Natasha says quietly.

“Yeah. The rest of the fucking universe.”

“You know what. Fine. I can’t stop you all from killing yourselves by facing him again. But that’s all you’re going to get from me. It’s over. I’m gone.”

“Fine,” Steve says. “So nothing’s changed. You know, I thought you might actually do the right thing this time, but I guess that was too much to hope for.”

“Fine. Consider me retired. I’m out.”

“Good,” Thor responds. There’s still lightning tracing up and down his arms. He’s giving up trying to control them. “Good, Stark, go. Because the next time I see you, I will kill you. If we had not just lost half of all life, I would have done it already for what you did.” His voice is rough with sincerity. There can be no doubt he is telling the truth.

There’s silence. The rest of the remaining Avengers staring intently down at the woodgrain of the table, avoiding all eye contact.

Tony lets out a little hysterical chuckle. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I should have expected that.” He turns and walks out of the room. After a moment, Rhodes follows.

Thor drops into his vacated seat and wills himself to stop shaking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear. To God. I wrote the WHO mask line _last summer_. Roughly last summer. (I know when I worked on each section, and I didn't revisit this chapter until I started rewriting.) I _swear_. I came across it myself back in April and I was like '...are you freakin' kidding me?' Yup. I figured people might not want to breathe in the dust produced. Wasn't figuring on everyone in the world having a massive conversation about masks and filtration and the WHO...but here we are...
> 
> Things got a bit tense here. I hope I balanced concerns in the argument and made it clear that like...everyone is upset and fired up and it's not a matter of right or wrong, it's about...being angry in a fucked up situation. I mean, okay, it may also have been me directly responding to...an imbalance I felt was there in the Endgame version of this argument? It's definitely still not an ideal situation. No one's happy. This anger is an extension of pain, for everyone involved. But! Tony's part in this story is not over. There will be more to come, and perhaps even a chance for reconciliation. 
> 
> Next week: It's time to kill Thanos. 
> 
> [Chapters don't perfectly alternate. We'll catch up with the others off in their strange Soul Realm the following week. ;-) ] As always, Comments/Kudos/Shares/Frogs always appreciated! Happy Friday! <3


	5. The Cost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanos reflects on his mission. The survivors take a step closer to killing him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings: this chapter contains some suicidal thoughts, and some canon-typical violence, and, as usual, pretty heavy on the apocalyptic themes. 
> 
> Enjoy!

_“There’s never been a true war that wasn’t fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.”_

_-Neil Gaiman, American Gods_

Death. At his fingertips. Rippling out from his hand.

Thanos has wanted this for so long. So long that he does rejoice though his chest is split in two, though he can taste blood on the back of his throat, though the gauntlet sends hot pain shooting down the nerves of his arm. He may shout, there’s no way to know with how the blood rushes in his ears. He might laugh instead, laugh at the pure joy that finally, after so many years, his victory is upon him.

He is gone from that mortal plane, in a flat quiet land. He is not alone.

“What did it cost?” Gamora asks in her little childish voice.

Thanos laughs. “Nothing I would not have paid a thousand times over.”

“Do you really understand what you’ve done?”

Thanos feels peace. Feels death soaking into his bones. “Yes.”

Gamora’s mouth sets into a grim line. “I don’t think you do.”

He blinks again and he has returned to the mortal plane, in pain, the heavy blade of the axe still buried in his chest cavity.

“-have you done?”

Thanos doesn’t bother answering. He has no need to explain himself to these pathetic, worthless creatures anymore. They are nothing but ants to him now. He has done it, become a god.

He leaves then, using the gauntlet to transport him in an instant to his refuge.

Then he sits and watches the sun rise and waits for his chest to heal. Thanos things then, about Gamora’s question. She is wrong. He does understand what he has done. He has brought death to the universe and for the first time in his long life he feels at peace.

Thor flees outside when he finds he can no longer suppress the sparks of lightning that dance on his skin. The storm has eased, leaving a grey and drizzly afternoon. He stands outside and tries not to think about what was said in their meeting. He tries not to feel guilt about his own harsh words, tries to let go of the lingering fury at Stark for all he had done, and that he is abandoning them now. The second part of that is easier said than done.

He has just managed to calm himself enough to no longer be at risk of setting the compound on fire when Nebula rounds the corner, and stops short. She turns to go but for whatever reason, he stops her. “Wait,” he calls. “You don’t have to leave.”

She’s tense, hesitant. “I didn’t think you would remember me.”

“I didn’t, not really. Process of elimination. I suppose I owe you my thanks, for freeing us.”

She nods. “I thought it would keep Thanos from getting the Stones. I guess I was wrong.”

“Well, thank you anyways.” They’re quiet for another moment. “What do you intend to do?” Thor asks her.

“My mission has not changed. I intend to kill my father.”

“Good.”

“They say you’re all planning on reversing the effects, if you can.”

“We have to try.”

“I don’t believe it’s possible. But I'll help you, if you promise that we kill Thanos at the end of it.”

“I promise. You don’t need to worry. I think even if we cannot reverse Thanos’s doings, all of us are intending on making sure he does not continue to live to savor it.” Thor wonders what he’ll do after that. The future looks only bleak.

“Good,” Nebula says firmly. “I have longed for Thanos’s death for a long time.” They stand in quiet for a few minutes. “I should go back to help Rocket.”

Thor nods and she leaves him alone again. The rain is starting to pick up again, the sky turning darker. There’s thunder in this distance but it’s natural this time. Nothing Thor can do but soak it up.

The rain is cool on his skin. He can’t stop thinking about Nebula. He does not know what to say to her.

She has suffered just as much as he had - more, given that it had been her whole life. But he does not know how to bridge the awkwardness, so he lets her walk away. In the rain, his temper cooled, he finds his mind drifting to the vision of her torture that Loki had summoned, the one that had given them the answer to where the Soul Stone was.

Thor has not had a vision since Thanos won. He would have no idea where to start conjuring one, and now no one to turn to to ask. He desperately wishes he could see the future with more reliability. Just to give himself one tiny glimmer of hope amidst the blackness.

He looks up at the stormy sky, and prays to whomever is listening to show him the future.

Thor goes to bed that night. His dreams are nothing. Replays of the moment when Thanos looked up at him and snapped his fingers. Nothing but replays of his greatest failure.

He wakes in the morning feeling even more numb, like he’s the one that’s dead.

It takes three full days, but they do it.

Bruce doesn’t quite believe it when the latest analysis comes back, showing crystal clear data. Precise coordinates. “Jane.” He turns in his chair. “Come take a look at this.”

She rolls over in her chair. Her eyes quickly scan over the screen. “Holy shit. Wait, I think we can narrow it down even more, if we get some of the noise cleared, wait…” She turns back to the computer and changes a few of the values. “Okay. There. That’s a much more specific location. Can you-”

“Got it.” Bruce loads the celestial map they’d gotten from the Asgardians, matching it up with their data. It shows clearly a spike of power, matching the signature of the Gauntlet, on a single planet with two moons. There is no other place it could be. No other place Thanos could be.

The two scientists sit in stunned silence for a moment, stewing in the weight of what they’ve accomplished.

“I’m going to run it all through again,” Jane finally says. “If we made some sort of error…I don’t…I don’t want to give them any false hope.”

“Agreed.”

Jane repeats what they’ve done carefully. When it’s done, it gives them the same approximation as it had the first time.

“Okay.” Bruce grins. “I think we can count that as a success.”

“Yeah.” Jane taps her finger on the counter. “Why am I not more excited? Why do I feel so weird about this?”

“I don’t know. But I get it, I feel more apprehensive than excited.” Bruce leans back and frowns. “I think it’s because…just because we’ve found him, doesn’t mean we can do anything about it, right? We just watched him pound us into the ground, murder half the universe. Just because we found him…”

“We could just be losing more people,” Jane interrupts. “We’re just risking what we have left. They could fail, and we could lose what little we have left.”

Bruce nods. “They’re definitely going to go after him though.”

“And I wouldn’t hold them back-”

“There’s nothing else any of us _can_ do. The Stones are the only possible thing that might reverse Thanos’s win. They’ve got to go, no matter the risk.”

“I agree. But yeah. It’s just…it’s big.”

“Hey,” Bruce smiles. “We just tracked down the bad guy using a never-before-seen energy source using nothing but satellite data and cobbled together data from two planets. We’re doing pretty good.”

Jane can’t help but smile back. “Okay, yeah, I suppose we are. I’ll call them.” She opens the secure channel to the Avengers compound in New York. “You think they’ll win?” There’s a tentative sort of hope in Jane’s voice.

“I don’t know. You’re right. I don’t want to hope. But there’s no other way forward. I can’t imagine going on like this, with half the world gone.”

“It feels like everything’s crumbling. It feels like it’s really the end this time, if we can’t undo it.”

The uplink connects and the image of Natasha appears, her hair sticking up. She looks still half-asleep. “Hey,” she says. “What’s up?”

Bruce takes a deep breath. “We found him.” Her eyes widen. She straightens up. “We found Thanos.”

It’s early, but Thor has long given up on sleep. He has been begging for a vision, any sort of hint of the future, but his dreams are shallow. Nothing but obsessive replays of the final battle. How short he fell of saving the universe. Loki vanishing before his eyes.

So the last time he woke and he saw light at the edges of the sky, he gave up and came outside.

“Something,” he whispers to the empty air. “Just give me some sign.”

“Thor.” Steve is standing in the doorway. He is already dressed and looks grave. “We found him. Jane and Bruce…they found Thanos.”

Thor looks back to the horizon. “Good.”

“We’re leaving in a few hours.”

“Good.”

The sun fully rises and Thor wishes even more bitterly that he had been able to conjure a vision of what's to come.

The ship is dead silent as they all board, strapping themselves to jump seats. The take the Guardian’s newly repaired Milano, with Rocket and Nebula at the helm. And Carol sitting directly behind, occasionally chiming in with suggestions. The third time she opens her mouth and Rocket shoots her a look, she shuts it again. “Never mind.”

Rocket relents after a moment. “Sorry. It’s just that you reminded me of Quill,” he says sadly. “He was always the worst backseat driver. I mean, so was I.”

“You two really were the worst.”

“Thanks, Nebula, that’s nice.”

They all sit in that moment of heaviness, feeling the gaping holes where they are all missing people.

They are quickly clear of Earth’s atmosphere, freed from its gravitational pull by a little shudder.

“We’re in space,” Clint says. “Huh. It’s kinda cool, right?” He has a gleam in his eye that reflects the stars. It’s the first time his mood has been lifted since this all started.

“Sure,” Steve says. It sounds strangled. Thor glances over at him and cannot suppress the grin. His face is tinged green.

“I didn’t even think you _could_ get motion sick, Rogers,” Natasha says.

“Well, I hadn’t tested it on _space travel_ yet.”

“You’ll get used to it, Captain,” Carol says. “I took Monica on sort of a post-grad road - well, space - trip to see a bit more of the galaxy. She grew up flying in cropdusters, sailing, dealing with her mother’s driving, and even she was puking for the first day or so. Was fine though, after that.”

“Great.”

“We’re approaching the jump point,” Rocket calls back. “So if you’re not used to space travel, now would be the time to grab a barf bag or you’ll be responsible for cleaning the inside of my ship, got it?”

“Jumping in 3…2…1…” Nebula hits a button and they slip through the jump points, four in total, until they’re spit out only a few clicks from the unnamed planet where the signal was detected.

Steve is gripping the arms of his chair hard.

“Well,” Natasha says. She looks a little pale now too. “That was interesting.” Clint just laughs.

They approach the planet. Quiet descends when they realize how close they are to Thanos - and the Gauntlet.

“Let’s do a lap first,” Carol says. “I don’t want any surprises.” Rocket hits a few buttons and brings up a screen that zooms in on the planet.

They orbit, scanning for signs of life. It appears mostly deserted, covered in dense forests interspersed with overgrown farmland. There are no signs of life until they spot a line of smoke rising from the chimney of a rundown hut on the edge of a field.

The mood in the ship is tense.

“Is there anywhere we can land undetected?”

“He’s probably already spotted us.”

“Maybe.” Rocket steers them closer to the planet’s pole. “But in case he hasn’t, we can enter the atmosphere in the other hemisphere, fly low and quiet, we might be able to slip in under his radar.” They take another turn and once they’re over the large sea on the other side, Rocket starts entry.

They skim the ocean. It’s almost beautiful, the way the sunlight refracts through the atmosphere to an orange glow, sparkling across the blue-green water. They come up fast on land, and Rocket slows them down, drops them lower, just over the trees.

“Next clearing we should land,” Steve says. “If he has any radar…”

“He hasn’t come after us yet,” Carol says. “Let’s get a little closer.”

“Why hasn’t he?” Clint leans forward. “Why doesn’t he have any backup? I don’t see any other ships or soldiers…”

“He’s probably just that sure of himself,” Natasha responds.

Rocket starts to lower them into a clearing. “I hope you’re all ready for this.”

Thor runs his hand over Stormbreaker’s blade. Steve sets his jaw. “We’re ready,” he says as they slip quietly into the trees.

Thanos had thought to destroy the Stones. To prevent anyone else from using them. He had thought about how, it had been part of his original plan. To commit his ultimate offering to Death, to set the universe to rights, and then fall back. Retire and let the chips fall as they may. Destroy the Gauntlet because what other use could there be for it?

He can’t do it. When he wakes from a fitful night’s sleep with his chest still aching, he looks at the Gauntlet and cannot find it in his heart to destroy it. He may still have need of it.

Thanos is well aware that there are those in the universe who have not accepted that his way was right. He is all too aware that he has likely made a great mistake leaving some of them alive. So much of his plan fell by the wayside towards the end, when his mind was filled only with the thought of achieving his goal, and then the waves of Death across the universe and how joyful it was.

He had thought to destroy those who resisted - especially those on Earth.

“What have you done?” The foolish king of Asgard had asked him with wide, shocked eyes. Neither his lightning or his axe had helped him in the end. He’d looked at the failures standing before him, and thought to destroy them, but did not. He saw the workings of the Stones, which would live and which would die. And he could see the fear on their faces. The horror.

The treacherous Loki stood not far from his brother. If Thanos had anyone he wished to kill with his own hands, it would be him. Loki who had failed him once and escaped twice. The snake, the filthy shapeshifter, cursed creature he had promised to make suffer.

But he was already turning grey. Thanos saw the way his cells were already beginning to break down, tear apart. He was set to turn to dust like the rest. And the others would have to live the rest of their lives with the thought of their failure. Let them live to taste the bitterness of regret, he thought. And perhaps once they’ve seen what good might come of this, they will lament their resistance.

So he just smiled and opened a portal home. To his garden where he may finally have peace.

Thanos sleeps, and recovers, and dwells in his tranquility. But he cannot bring himself to destroy the Gauntlet. The thought, once a natural ending to his plan, now seems utterly abhorrent to him. He sets it on a table in the corner of his hut, in plain view.

It’s nearing sunset now. Thanos has not counted the days since his victory. He sits in the quiet and watches the warm light bathe the fields of wildflowers, of untamed wheat. Peace.

His mind does not yet turn to the way that all across the universe, societies begin to crumble. Just like he had never bothered to check in on planets he had cleansed before. It doesn’t occur to him that this scale of death would only bring exponential suffering. Even if it did, he would only blame it on his victims. He would claim that they did not understand. That they were too weak to accept passing grief for enduring prosperity. (That his entire philosophy is based on unsound principles certainly does not occur to him.) He remains in his delusion that while the universe is in shock, it would soon adjust. Come to praise him. To worship him.

He would soon be a god.

“He really doesn’t have any backup? Security? What the hell?” Rocket lowers his binoculars. “This guy’s crazy.”

They all crouch in the bush, spread between two groups. The rundown farm is still silent, Thanos’s hulking form sitting unmoving by the fire. He’s looking out at the fields, apparently alone.

“It could be a trap,” Clint says.

“Especially with what he can do with the Gauntlet. The Reality Stone. He might have just created this whole illusion to lure us in,” Steve says.

“Or he could just be that much of an asshole,” Carol says.

“He is, indeed, that much of an asshole, as you say,” Nebula says lowly. She does not take her eyes off the shack. “He thinks he’s won. He thinks it’s over. He would never think that us ants would never dare to rebel.”

“He does not know we were able to track him. It’s not like we’re storming Sanctuary,” Thor says. “He traveled here using the Space Stone. He would never think that mere Midgardians would be able to trace him.”

“He’s let down his guard,” Natasha says. “This might be our one chance. We can’t pass up, even if it’s risky.”

“And we came all this way.” Clint grins but it’s more a grim scowl.

Steve nods. “Okay. We keep to the plan. Spread out, keep him surrounded. Nebula, Thor take care of the frontal assault. Everyone else hang back. Be on the lookout for illusions. And remember, we need to get the Gauntlet.”

“The Stones are our best chance.”

“And try not to die,” Steve says with a meaningful glance around. “I know it’s easy to throw ourselves at this. But we’ve already lost so much. We can’t afford to lose anyone else. Fall back if you’re in trouble. We use our numbers against him and hope that we can get him away from the gauntlet.”

They spread out in a perimeter around Thanos’s hut and wait for Steve’s signal. Thor is not far from Nebula in the trees. He catches her eye and nods. She returns it. He still does not know what to say to her, but knows that they’re united in this quest for revenge.

If they had been an hour earlier, they might have gotten lucky. They might have killed Thanos and taken the gauntlet from its place of honor in his hut.

They are not lucky.

Thanos could not just leave it off. The Gauntlet’s power drew him in. He liked the way he felt when he wore it, like he was inviolable, like he was still basking in the deaths it had taken. So while he watched the sunset, he put it on, running his fingers over and over the Stones in their settings, feeling their power.

He had spent so long searching for these Stones, the only thing he wants to do now is bathe in their glory.

So he is wearing it when they strike.

Steve’s whistle pierces the quiet, sending a flock of birds flying into the sky, the signal to attack.

Thor and Nebula go first, as planning. Thanos manages to dodge a swing of Thor’s axe, but Nebula gets in with a long sword and he only barely blocks her blade.

“Nebula,” he growls. “I should have made sure you died.”

“Too bad, _Father_.” She ducks under, just as Thor swings the axe again - this time at his head - but the Gauntlet on his hand glints in the light and shoots a bolt towards him, sending him skittering back. Carol takes his place, then Clint, shooting an arrow that explodes just before impact as a distraction. Steve tries to get in under his defenses but is frozen by the Gauntlet’s power.

Thor swings again, lightning flashing. Thanos dodges the first, rippling through a quick portal, and barely catches the second swing with a beam of violet from the Power Stone. Lightning swirls around them, prickling at Thanos’s skin. He holds on, even as Thor bears down harder with the axe.

“You should have killed me when you had the chance, Titan,” Thor says.

“No,” Thanos laughs, still holding back the blade. “Because then I would have missed seeing the look on your face, when you realized you had lost. The grief in your eye as you came to accept that you lost your pathetic wretch of a brother for good this time.”

Thor falters. It’s enough of a distraction that Thanos manages to shift his weight, to throw Thor off balance and send him skittering backwards with a bolt of energy from the Power Stone. Thor manages to keep his feet and Natasha takes his place, backed up a moment later by Carol and her streaming golden power.

Thanos turns his attention on her, parrying the stream with one of violet. He sends her back, but Steve is there a second later, forcing Thanos to turn away.

He’s surrounded and outnumbered and injured. But they quickly discover that still it does not seem enough, not against the cruel creativity of the gauntlet.

Thanos manages to fight back. He unravels reality to trap Carol in a web of entangled wheat branches, which takes her several minutes to undo. Guns are made useless. Any bullets fired freeze in midair and then rewind back into their chambers. Thor gets close once again, lightning swirling around him, but a bolt from the Power Stone sends reverberating shocks through his nerves. He has to take a knee It seems as though every time they manage to get close, he sends them back. But still they fight against him.

“We have to get the gauntlet!” Steve cries.

“Is that what you’re looking for?” Thanos closes his fist and the ground turns to liquid. Steve starts to sink into the earth. “Looking to undo it. Do you not know when you’ve been beaten?” He opens his hand and a concussive waves sends the others flying backwards. Steve still fights to free himself from the earth as Thanos approaches.

“You really thought we’d let you walk away?” Steve keeps his gaze level back. “You think we’d just let you retire, after you murdered-”

“I saved far more than I murdered.”

“Liar!” Nebula screams out. She moves fast, twin blades keeping Thanos on his back foot, dodging them. “I will see your throat cut for what you did to my sister.”

“I didn’t want to kill Gamora,” Thanos roars back. “But I could not let _sentiment_ stop me, not when I was so close-”

Nebula screams and attacks. In her rage, she does well. He’s starting to slow. The healing wound on his chest is stretched, leaking blood. But he still has the Gauntlet. The Power Stone is still strong enough to send her flying back when he manages to catch up, get a hand between them. Nebula hits the ground and does not move.

There is just Thor now, fueled by his own vengeful rage. If he moves quickly enough-

Thor almost has him. It’s by a millimeter, the blade of his axe skimming the skin of his shoulder. Thanos’s eyes go wide with shock. Thor regains his footing, turns to aim again-

Thanos retreats. He opens a blue portal with the Space Stone and lets space fold over him.

“No!” Thor cries. “Not this time.” He raises Stormbreaker - still half uncertain this will even work - and conjures the rainbow light of the bifrost. He launches himself into space, chasing after Thanos in the Void.

It is actually working. He can feel the power of the Stones, he can trace it through the light. Space and light roars around him as he narrows the gap.

Something throws him off course. In an instant he loses the trail and the bifrost spits him out on a deserted, rocky planet. Thor lands in a crouch and fights to catch his breath.

He curses in four languages and throws Stormbreaker into the dust. As his fury recedes, leaving behind bitter disappointment, the utter silence of this deserted planet becomes deafening. The stars shine above him, looking down at him with cold judgment. He has failed again. He cannot save his brother, he cannot save the universe. He cannot even give it the proper vengeance it deserves.

Thor sits back on his heels and remains in the quiet a moment longer. He considers for a moment staying. Never going back to face the others, but letting himself slowly fade here in the darkness. Letting his body waste away until finally his spirit is unmoored to haunt the Void.

Thor sighs and gets to his feet. He fetches Stormbreaker from the dust and uses it to return to where the others wait, bewildered. They startle at his sudden return.

“I lost him.”

Steve nods. “Makes sense. Not your fault.”

Everyone is miraculously, relatively unharmed. Nebula shakes off her daze from the impact. There are a few cuts and scrapes, but they are all fine. Thor wishes he could feel joy at that. But he is numb.

“Let’s search the house.” Natasha brushes dirt of her legs. “Maybe we’ll find something…” Carol nods and starts towards the half destroyed hut. Clint stays seated in the grass, not looking at any of them.

Nebula suddenly kicks at the stack holding Thanos’s armor. She had been standing and staring up at it in silence and now she strikes out, splintering the wood and sending the armor crashing to the ground.

“Nebula?” Rocket starts towards her. Instead of answering, she screams, a cry so full of rage, so raw, that they all look away from her, to give her privacy.

She screams, furious, as the sun sets.

Once Thanos has thrown Thor off his tail, he goes to Sanctuary. He arrives in a swirl of blue smoke, trembling with fury.

“Master,” Ebony Maw gasps upon his entrance. He drops into a low bow. “We did not know where you were-”

“I was taking a much needed rest.” Thanos looks up at his stone throne, pausing for a moment before ascending the steps. The surviving members of the Black Order - his children - look to him with relief. Proxima is gone, but Thanos expected some casualties. The others look battered but whole. There are a few others, the commanders of his auxiliary forces. Not as close as the Order, but he counts them as loyal. “That rest is over. I was interrupted. By a foolish collection of heroes who call themselves the Avengers.”

“They still live,” Cull Obsidian growls.

“They do. Some, at least.”

“Half, I assume,” Corvus says. Thanos twists the Gauntlet and a rock near his head explodes, making him jump.

“Yes. Half have survived.” Thanos hesitates. There had been more…not counting his rebellious Nebula, there had been at least one face there that he did not recognize. They amass allies. Followers. A dangerous prospect. “Enough to threaten me.”

“Master,” the Maw says, taking a knee. “We are here for you, as we always have been. We will do all that you ask to ensure your victory remains unchallenged.”

“I thought I would be able to retire, once my task was done.” Thanos settles back against the throne. It feels like he had never left it. “I see now that that is impossible. My task is much greater. I must continue to work to safeguard our victories, as long as there are those who would seek to undo that work, to return the universe to chaos and suffering. It is my duty to eliminate them.” He touches the Gauntlet where the Stones hum. “No. Not just eliminate them. I must destroy them. I must show the universe what will happen if they resist the inevitable. If they threaten my gift.” His audience is captivated. Thanos has no doubts that they are ready to jump back into the war. “We will start with Earth. We will bring them to heel and make sure that all understand that this is the new order. That I am the new order. Death is the new order. It is inevitable.”

In the silence that follows, a slow grin spreads over Corvus’s face. Cull looks ready, determined. Maw bows his head, looking delighted.

Thanos smiles. “Gather my remaining armies, and my ship. We return to Earth.”

If the universe did not want him as their benevolent god, he will show them the meaning of a wrathful one.

The ride back to Earth is silent. No one speaks except for Carol and Rocket, and even they only speak when necessary to pilot the ship. Nebula had declined to co-pilot the return journey, sitting in the back and seething for the whole ride.

They land on the back lawn of the Avengers compound and robotically make their way inside. Rocket stays to fix up the ship. No one knows what to say to Nebula as she stalks away. The remaining Avengers go to sit in the living room, in silence as night falls outside.

“I’m sorry,” Thor says finally. “It was my fault.”

“How do you figure?” Carol asks. “You were the one who managed to get closest to killing the asshole.” She seems tired. The confidence is gone from her.

“But I did not. I failed, again. I was distracted…” He thinks of the savage gleam in Thanos’s eye when he spoke of Loki. “And then I was not able to follow his trail. I failed.”

“Hey,” Natasha says. “You did your best.” Ah, his least favorite phrase. He opens his mouth to respond when suddenly the lights go out.

“Okay, what the heck?” Clint says.

They find flashlights and portable lanterns.

“The grid’s out,” Steve finally says. “It’s the whole county, at least.”

“I thought we had generators,” Natasha says. “Those should have kicked in.”

Steve skims the maintenance reports on one of the wall-mounted tablets. “They did. The power’s been out since just after we left. Looks like we just run out of juice for the generator.”

“Can we fix it?”

“I have…” Steve sighs. “Literally no idea.”

“Stark would know,” Clint says. “But given our last conversation, I doubt he’s going to be all that interested in turning the lights back on.”

“We can have Rocket take a look at it in the morning,” Natasha says. “He seems pretty handy. He might be able to get the generators working at least.”

They return to the living room, lighting it with candles. They salvage some of the food from the fridge, to use it up before it starts to go bad. Their dinner is quiet and mechanical. None of them really taste the food on their tongues.

It’s late when Natasha opens her mouth again. Thor thinks she’s going to say she’s going to bed, but instead she carefully says, “I think we might have to start thinking about accepting this.”

They all turn this over for a mind.

“Nat…” Clint says, sounding wrecked. "Not you too."

“How can we?” Carol responds halfheartedly.

“I don’t think we can,” Steve says after another moment. “Or at least…we have to keep trying until the bitter end. Because once we give up…it will all be over. Really over.” He glances at Thor. “You were right, what you said before. This means the end of everything.” Steve looks around and when no one else response, he continues. “We can’t sustain ourselves. Everything’s going to collapse. Look at the electrical grid, it’s already starting. The death toll is going to rise - a lot - in the next few days.”

“But what are we going to do?” Natasha says. “I’m not saying that I think we can recover from this, I know too well what’s going to happen. How conditions are going to further degrade. I’m just saying that we need to start figuring out how to deal with our long term problems. Yes, things are going to get bad, _really_ bad. But we have to start wrapping our heads around the fact that we might not be able to fix this. We might not be able to go back. I just think that we should maybe start…getting our affairs in order. And prepare for the fact that we might not be able to get the revenge on Thanos that we want.”

“I can’t accept that.” Thor’s voice is rough. “I refuse to accept that.”

“He’s probably going to keep getting stronger. That wound in his chest is going to heal, he’s going to get used to using the Gauntlet, going to gather allies again…”

Steve shakes his head. “It’s going to be more than just things getting bad. And I know, Nat, that you’ve seen a lot, I don’t want to dismiss that. But…” Steve runs a hand through his hair. “…Jesus, the scale of it all. Fifty percent. And there’s going to be so much more. People are going to starve. People are going to die because they can’t get medicine or help. And beyond that a lot of people are going to kill themselves because they’ve got nothing left to live for, and no hope for the future.”

Thor wonders if he imagines Steve glancing at him and then quickly away. His mind turns towards the Void of stars. He keeps his gaze straight ahead. “I told Steve that I had seen the end of the world before. And that this was bigger. What Thanos has done will, in time, lead to the death of all the universe. That, I believe.” 

"Yes," Natasha says. "Exactly." The weight of it settles around them. Natasha isn't arguing what Stark had - she's not talking about moving on with their lives. She's talking about accepting that their lives are over. That they may very likely never be able to fix what was broken. That the end is not something they can prevent.

It might all be over.

"Okay," Steve says. He leans forward and puts his face in his hands. "Okay..."

“And what about Thanos?” Clint says. “Not just revenge, but you really think he’s going to leave us alone forever? If he decides retirement is too boring?”

“And we probably seriously pissed off back there,” Carol says.

“He will not be pleased that we were able to track him. He will want to ensure we cannot undo his work. We should he ready for him to turn his gaze back towards us.” Thor thinks it is very likely, indeed. He has no idea where Thanos disappeared to. But he has been half expecting his return since they arrived back on Earth.

“So we might not be able to fix it, and Thanos might be on his way to pay us back for trying to kill him,” Clint says bitterly. “What the fuck are we supposed to do?”

Steve sits up. “I think all we can do…is last as long as possible. Keep trying until the end of…” He falters. “The end of the line. We might still get somewhere, even a small chance is a chance. We can give people hope. It doesn’t have to be _real_. It’s…we can fake it, ’til we make it. We can do some big, visible things. Disaster relief. Helping where we can. We can act normally. People, like that guy in Atlanta…they’ll take us as a symbol of hope. And maybe we can save some lives.”

“We can give the survivors a chance at living out what's left of their lives in some sort of happiness before everything really falls apart,” Natasha says. “If you’re right,” She looks at Steve and Thor. “And everything’s careening towards the abyss, we can give them a chance to build something, have some small satisfaction before the end. There’s going to be a lot we can’t control - we still have no idea what’s going on in most governments, including the United States - so there’s still going to be violence, chaos. But maybe, with a bit of hope, at least some of them will be able to find some peace before the end. And if you’re right,” She reaches over and touches Clint’s shoulder, squeezing. “We can’t stay here for long. We’re going to have to draw Thanos away from Earth - from any major civilian population.”

Steve nods. “Yes. It makes perfect sense. We stay long enough to make everyone think we’ve got a handle on things, then we take off. Leave Earth behind to protect them from Thanos.”

“Leave? Forever?” Clint blinks at him.

“I’ve done it before. It’s not…it’s not all bad.” Thor smiles faintly. “One adapts.” He has, indeed, left behind a home that he can never refer to. For a moment, he misses Asgard so badly he can taste it. He blinks and for a moment he can see it all. His rooms, his things, the sight beyond his window - the expanse of the city, waters running down towards the edge. Places he had traveled, places he had been with his friends, with his family. All dead, all gone. Even the places where echoes might have been are wiped away.

He had adapted. But that was destroyed as well, those strange halcyon days where they were struggling, where they were scraping by, but there was such a pure sense of unity, of survival. Of rebuilding. It won’t be the same this time.

He could be reunited with some of his people, with Heimdall, if he really wanted to. But he knows that that will bring Thanos’s ire down on the scant remains of his people. They have been through too much already. They too, are fading. They deserve some peace at the end. And besides, he cannot bring himself to face them.

Before they depart Earth, Thor will go to Wakanda and send them a message. He will tell them to respect Heimdall’s leadership and find whatever serene plot of land they can to live out their remaining years in as much peace as they can. Then he will board the small ship with all that remains of the Avengers, and go to seek his own quiet death. Maybe then he will be worthy of Valhalla and maybe there, in death, will be the only place Thanos cannot reach him. He will see his brother again, his parents, the Valkyrie, his friends...

Clint’s eyes are glassy. “It’s just…it’s where my kids…” He clears his throat.

“It will be hard,” Natasha says. “Leaving things behind always is. But it’s going to be the best way to keep what’s left safe.”

“We have to give Earth a chance,” Carol says with a faint smile. “Even if it means leaving it behind.”

“Let’s take things one step at a time,” Steve says. “One step at a time. Let’s get the situation stabilized as best we can, then we’ll-”

The ground shakes. The auditory boom takes a moment to reach them, like thunder following behind lightning.

“What was that?!” Natasha cries.

“I have no idea.” Steve gets to his feet only to stagger when another explosion rocks the compound.

They all manage to get to their feet and rush outside, to where the stars are blocked out by a massive black ship.

Thanos has acted faster than they anticipated. He has followed them and all their planning is shattered in an instant. All of it, utterly meaningless.

“So we fight once again,” Thor reaches out a hand and summons Stormbreaker, crackling with lightning. He is grimly determined, filled with a smoldering sense of duty. Carol nods, bringing power to her hands. Steve picks up his shield.

They advance to where Nebula is standing tall, a look on her face like she was planning on facing Thanos entirely alone.

They are the ones caught off guard this time. And vastly outnumbered. There is no chance to organize a coordinated defense. Only try to open up an avenue for a retreat.

Luckily for them, Rocket had already been with the ship. And Thanos seems singularly focused on Thor.

This is quite fine by Thor. “I’ll hold him off,” he calls as rain starts coming down. “Go!”

“Thor!” Steve calls back. “Wait!”

Thor ignores him as he takes his axe and launches himself into the air.

“Back again?” Thanos calls over the roar of the thunder. He grins, the smile splitting his face. “So soon you're ready to fail again?”

Thor says nothing, only brings his axe down with a roar. It’s barely a battle - more like a duel between them, with others skirmishing in the back of his perception. Thor only has eyes for Thanos.

Natasha was right, Thanos is recovering. His moves, his strikes of power with the Gauntlet more precise, more skilled. Thor barely blocks his many strikes with the now all too familiar destructive violet light of the Power Stone. Thanos grins viciously at Thor. He thinks Thanos is using the Power Stone so much to taunt him. He can almost hear his own screams in his ears, see the Ark crumble around him as he and Loki are dragged off to Sanctuary for further torment.

Thor blocks the next strike and with a cry brings down lightning from the clouds.

Thanos’s strike was a feign - in the moment that the lightning comes down, he slips in under Thor’s defenses and with the concentrated power of all the Stones, hits Thor square in the chest. They are blown apart by the combined impact of the Gauntlet and the Lightning.

The strike blazes an agonizing path across Thor’s chest, up his shoulder and neck. The skin splits, his armor in tatters. Thor can no longer keep his feet, dropping to his knees. He tries to catch his breath and dully, he realizes that he is dying. He greets this only with disappointment that he did not get to kill Thanos before he goes.

“We have to go!” Steve’s voice seems to come from very far away. But his hand is under his arm, dragging. Someone else is on his other side, he vaguely recognizes after a moment as Carol. They pull him backwards, the ground gives way to metal, Thor falls onto his back.

Blood flows onto the floor of the ship.

“Come on!” Rocket hits a few buttons on the console. “We’ve got to go!”

Natasha is there, closing the door.

“There’s no way we’re going to make it out of the atmosphere,” Carol sits in the seat next to him.

“We’ve just got to get out from under these assholes, get somewhere safe, shit-”

Nebula jumps onto the gangway just as Natasha shuts the gate.

“I was about to leave you behind,” Rocket says. “Shields up. Let’s get out of here!”

All of this happens in Thor’s perception through a haze. Like it is happening far away. Blood keeps flowing, even though Steve presses cloth to the wound, trying to stem the flow.

“Stay with us, man,” Steve says. “Come on, I can’t lose anybody else…”

Thor can say nothing. He has lost the ability to speak and he would have nothing to say to comfort his friend.

At the last moment, before the darkness closes in, he remembers the way Steve had come for him on the Raft, the gentle way he had helped them recover in Lithuania, and wished he had the words to thank him for it before he died.

He closes his eyes and lets the quiet settle in. He is unconscious before they slip away from Thanos’s forces.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay. Okay, so. 
> 
> I'm sorry? (I'm not.) 
> 
> So, killing Thanos is going to be a tad bit more complicated than they would have thought. I never really believed Thanos would destroy the Stones, that he would actually 'retire'. People who want that much power over others don't just give it up when they get it. They don't just stop at their stated goal. They escalate. Thanos wanted to be a god but he wanted to trick himself into believing he really was doing it for the greater good. Even if the Avengers hadn't come after him and sparked him back into action, I think he would have lasted, oh, a week, tops, before he started being like 'well, I should just go check to make sure everyone is appropriately grateful for the gift I've given them' and when he found they were not, start escalating the violence and seizing control again. 
> 
> Next week, we return to the strange world that the dusted ended up, where they're finding more questions than answers in their investigations. 
> 
> Comments/Kudos/Shares/Frogs always appreciated! Happy Friday! <3


	6. A Strange Place

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the strange pocket realm, there are questions and theories and explorations - but few answers.

_“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”_

_-Edgar Allan Poe_

While those that remained try and fail to kill Thanos, the realm of the Soul Stone remains quiet and still, all swirling violet skies and wide, empty fields.

The morning after Strange arrives with the Guardians of the Galaxy in tow, Loki wakes from foul dreams with a jolt. These dreams are not the strange ones he had had his first night on this plane, but the more familiar nightmares of being bound head to toe in the darkness. It takes a moment to shake off the dregs of the dream, for his heart to stop racing and for his magic to stop seeking out what’s not there.

That one hurts. It’s instinctual now, reaching for his connection to Thor. He’d gotten better at resisting it, towards the end, but with the trauma of Thanos dissolving his body to ash and trapping him in this bizarre limbo, has Loki reaching back for the well-worn coping mechanism. It cuts deep when his magic reaches the end of the tether, stuttering over the broken connection. Thor is farther out of his reach than every before. Loki lays flat on back as his breath slows and the misery recedes.

The Valkyrie is still asleep next to him, pressed closed to his side. He does take comfort in that, that they have been reunited even when all else has been lost.

After he feels a bit less like he’s falling apart, he rises. Everyone else is still asleep. Except Wanda, perched on a fallen log.

“All quiet?”

She jumps a little. “Yes. All quiet.”

“I thought you took the first watch.” Loki sits on the ground next to her. “Did you sleep at all?”

Wanda looks down. “No.”

“You should try.”

“And have more nightmares, like you?” She snaps back. Loki tenses for a moment, but she looks immediately guilty. “I’m sorry. You did not deserve that.” She looks down at her hands. “I did not mean to hurt you, any of you. With what I said. But you have to understand…”

“I do,” Loki says gently. “You did not wish to have false hope.”

“I think it will break me, to lose everything again.” She sighs. “Already I find myself already wishing it were over. I wish that I were not trapped in this half-dead state. I feel only exhaustion at the thought of having to try to escape. I will, because I would not condemn the rest of you to this but I cannot help but think that I have nothing to return to.”

Loki has nothing to say to that. He sits with her in silence as the light fully returns. They can see the full expanse of the plain now, still empty.

“I killed him,” Wanda whispers, almost too quietly to hear. “He trusted me. He loved me. And I killed him.”

“Thanos killed him. You should feel no guilt.”

“Maybe so. But still.”

“Well. If you have nothing else to cling to, will revenge on Thanos for making you do what you did suffice?”

Wanda’s lips twitch. “It might.”

Sam has woken now, stretching his arms up as he rises.

“Everything okay?” He comes over to where they are sitting. “Weren’t you supposed to wake me?”

“I needed some time to think,” Wanda says. “And I didn’t take a watch the first night, so I thought I’d give you all a good night’s rest.”

“Anything happen?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Good, I guess. Though I’m definitely getting to the point where I want something to happen. Because all this nothing is starting to really freak me out.” Sam sighs and scratches the back of his head. “I guess we’re going to have to do this the long way.”

Thus begins their investigation.

In teams, they explore out from their little copse of trees, fanning out to try to find any other structures or signs of life. They have mixed results.

They attempt to remain methodical about it. There’s not much to keep notes, but they take Peter Parker up on his offer to keep notes. He invents a shorthand and uses a knife Loki conjures for him to carve it into the bark of the largest tree. Loki sacrifices a spare cape to be used to make a map. They unravel the thread and stretch it between the branches of a tree, using other scraps of fabric to represent what they find and mark off places they’ve explored.

Evenings are spend theorizing. Trying to synthesize the information they’ve found, the evidence they’ve gathered, and trying to fit it into Strange’s vision. He remains convinced that they are within the Soul Stone, in a pocket dimension created by the gauntlet, but Loki’s faith in that conclusion begins to waver.

“I just don’t believe it is so simple,” he says one evening.

Sam shoots Loki an incredulous look. “What’s simple about a rock creating a pocket dimension and trapping trillions of people in it?”

“Oh, of course, it would appear to be incredibly complex, to be sure. But I’m still not sure it is the whole story. Because _why?_ Why would the Stones _want_ to create this place, why would they want to trap us here?”

“Fuel?” Strange says. “They have to draw power from somewhere-”

“I thought they created their own power,” Wanda asks.

“Yes, but the Soul Stone seemed unique among them, given the way it required a sacrifice to be retrieved,” the Valkyrie says. Peter looks away. Groot wraps an arm around his shoulders. “It may have taken us to act as a power source.”

“But you think that…this wasn’t just about the Stone…but about the universe being broken?”

“The scale of death, at one single moment, that Thanos produced is entirely unprecedented,” Loki says. “Perhaps this realm, this plane of existence, was created because the normal laws of life and death broke under the strain of it. Thanos’s victory, the way he brought together the Stones and used them to bring death in such a massive scale…it violates every rule of the universe. I do not know that our reality can withstand it.” Loki doesn’t necessarily know if he is any more right or wrong than Strange. The evidence they’ve gathered is still confusing and contradictory, and they are unable to perform any scientific or even magical tests. But there is something in the back of his mind that tells him the universe is falling apart and they are running out of time. “Or it could be both,” he admits. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be one or the other. The Soul Stone feeding off our lives, the universe falling apart. Both might be true.”

“That makes sense,” Sam says. “I mean, not really, none of this makes any actual sense but. Sure.”

“The important part is that we were meant to be here,” Strange says firmly. “For whatever reason, we have to be here to fix it. Work from both sides.”

Loki frowns, touches the center of his chest where the ache has grown, and says nothing else.

That night Loki has a strange dream that their map turns into a loom. He’s standing before it in their clearing and it grows, stretching up to a massive loom that seems to go all the way to the sky. Loki blinks and he’s standing in his mother’s workroom, on Asgard. A place that no longer exists, that’s been turned to ash. Loki has not been here in years. He takes a turn around the room, running his fingertips over the spines of her books, the surfaces of the worktables. The homesickness is so strong that even in the dream he feels faint. The loom in the center has their map in the frame.

He turns, hearing a footstep in the hall outside. Loki lunges towards the door but wakes up before he can see who it was. Their map, little scraps of fabric strung between the trees, remains unchanged.

The days take on a pattern. They split off into smaller groups and set off, with one team staying behind in the trees. They turn back before the darkness falls, return to the trees to update their map and discuss what they found that day.

Their theorizing often turns to general storytelling, a bittersweet exercise when the tales turn towards those they’ve left behind in the world of the living. Loki doesn’t participate, but he does smile when the Valkyrie relates some of the more humorous tales of their time on the Ark.

There is mourning, and despair, and nightmares. It’s not easy. But they fight through their anguish to keep their purpose in sight. Strange keeps a singular focus on his vision - that there is a purpose for their presence on this plain of existence that will make itself clear in time. Loki keeps absorbing information into his theories and managing the dull ache in his chest. It starts to wake him up at night.

Cursing Thanos is an often-indulged in pastime, led enthusiastically by Drax. Sometimes they plot and plan their eventual revenge, but Sam usually puts a stop to it before it gets too graphically violent, with sidelong glances at Peter Parker and the evidently juvenile Groot. That doesn’t stop them from discussing their more violent fantasies once they’re out of earshot. Loki finds he rather likes this Bucky Barnes character. He has some _very_ good ideas.

Eventually, out on the plains, there are other people.

Not really. Not in any real way. They can’t interact with them, but sometimes in the plains they come across the shadowy impressions of other people. Like ghosts.

“Do you think they see us like this?” Peter asks. “Jesus, this is creepy.” One walks by him, and then threw another.

“Maybe they can’t see anyone else at all,” T’Challa says.

“We knew there must have been others.” Loki doesn’t know why he feels compelled to speak in a whisper. “Thanos killed half the universe after all. They all must have ended up here.”

“But why do they look like that?” Peter asks. “And we can see each other just fine?”

“I have no idea,” Loki says.

“Yup. It’s pretty creepy.”

“It is.”

But even this, after a while, they get used to. They come across these figures regularly and they never seem to register their presence or act in any way aggressive, so they file the figures away as an oddity rather than a threat.

Time moves strangely in this place. It feels like a lot is passing, but equally it feels like none has passed at all.

“Do you think that it’s passing at the same rate out there?” Bucky asks quietly one night. “Back there? You know.”

“I hope not,” Loki says. The thought of leaving Thor out there, thinking he was dead, was too horrifying to bear. If it had been as long out there as it had been here…Thor was likely destroyed with grief. Loki doesn’t want to think about how reckless he’s surely being, what trouble he’s courting in his grief.

And Thanos was still out there. Loki’s mouth goes dry. He is suddenly filled with panicked desperation to get back, to save Thor from Thanos’s grasp-

It takes effort not to entirely fall apart. He only holds it together by pressing down on his palm with the opposite thumb until it hurts. He can feel eyes on him - doesn’t know if they’re Sam’s or the Valkyrie’s - and tries to keep the distress off his face.

“I don’t think so,” Strange says. “But I can’t say for certain. I have no idea how much time is passing back there.”

Peter Quill keeps a secret.

Mostly because he thinks the others will think he’s going crazy. He’s pretty sure it’s all in his head.

It makes sense that he’d dream about Gamora. He had been dreaming about her every night since Thanos took her off Knowhere. The dreams get more intense once they end up here, but that’s normal too. Everyone’s having bizarre dreams in this weird place.

She appears in his dreams like she’s trying to talk to him. To tell him something. But it’s like she’s on mute. They’re standing knee deep in water on Vormir.

“Gamora,” he says. “Gamora, I’m sorry, I can’t hear you-”

She stops her feet in frustration, making the water ripple around her. He can hear the splashing of the water, but she opens her mouth again and nothing comes out. Her lips move rapidly, her arms extend towards him like she’s pleading for him to understand - but nothing.

“Gamora, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Peter feels like he’s going to cry. “I don’t understand, Gamora, I’m _sorry_.”

She tosses back her head and silently howls in frustration. Peter jerks away on the ground in the copse of trees, Drax snoring loudly at his side.

The fourth time he has the dream he’s pretty sure he’s going to go crazy.

Not as crazy as he feels when he sees her for the first time in the flesh.

Well. He doesn’t know if it’s in the flesh or not, and he’s pretty sure she’s a hallucination. The first time he sees her is on an otherwise uneventful scouting mission with Sam and Mantis.

It’s just a glimpse. In the tall grasses, of a small figure with green skin and red hair that looks at him for a second, then turns and slips away into the grass. Even though it’s not the adult Gamora he knows, Peter recognizes her instantly. Peter’s mouth is dry as he starts after her - only to find she’s completely vanished.

“What? You find something?” Sam asks.

“No,” Peter responds, turning back. “Just spooky out here, is all.”

Mantis doesn’t look like she believes him and he doesn’t get close enough to let her touch him, and sense the truth of his feelings. That he wasn’t just spooked, but confused, with a tinge of hope.

He starts to see her more often. Gamora always appears as a child, always invisible to everyone else, which makes him pretty sure she’s not real. He hasn’t thought too hard about why she keeps appearing as a child, that seems weird, but he’s sure some psychiatrist would tell him it represents his repressed trauma about his own childhood, or his guilt over not being there for Gamora when she was alone and vulnerable. He doesn’t go too deep into it. He just kind of thinks he’s losing it, and decides not to tell anyone else.

And he’s sure he’s not the only one keeping secrets. For one, he knows for sure that the Valkyrie is keeping them. She hasn’t mentioned anything about the giantess seer they had met on Vormir, and once when it looked like the conversation was veering closer to it, she met his eye and shook her head. He doesn’t know why she wants to keep that to herself, but he respects her decision. The others he’s certain have their own secrets as well. So he figures it wasn’t so bad that he kept his hallucinations of Gamora to himself.

It was all that he had left of her.

There are structures out in the plains.

It takes a while to find them. There aren’t any in their immediate vicinity, the majority of this realm is nothing but empty grasslands, but as they start to explore farther and farther outside their small circle they start to find things. Rocks in the landscape, other clusters of trees. Eventually ruins,

Loki and the Valkyrie one day are out together when they come across the ruins of a massive temple, overgrown with weeds. It’s the most defined structure they’ve found so far. They slip carefully inside to explore. It’s empty. Their footsteps echo on the walls.

“What the fuck is this?”

“I don’t know,” Loki says. He leans heavily on a collapsed bit of the wall. “I must admit, I feel beyond useless. I know nothing about this place, I can only offer…magical theorems and…I cannot help but…”

“We’re making progress, aren’t we?” She says back. “This,” She waves at the ruins. “Is progress? Right?”

“Yes,” but it comes out more of a curse than an assent. She shoots him a look and he sinks his head into his hands. “I’m so tired, Valkyrie. I’m so tired of all of this.” He lets out a laugh. “So we found this place, what of it? What does this do to get us closer to solving all of this? No matter what we find here, none of it gets us any closer - I want to go home.” His voice breaks.

Loki hadn’t slept well the night before. He had been wracked with familiar nightmares all night, waking frequently, disoriented and reaching for Thor. The dreams had shifted from dreams of Thanos’s torture to being bound on the Raft and then back again. They’d plagued him all night, and he couldn’t shake them through the day as they hiked out through the plains. Like a pot boiling over, the frustration and despair building until he gave into it, sitting in another mystery he can’t solve.

“I know you want to go home,” the Valkyrie says slowly. “I know.”

“You don’t. You have no idea,” Loki sits up. “What I’ve been through. What we went through. What Thanos did and he’s out there somewhere and we are _wandering_ in this cursed _fucking_ place.” His voice rises to a shout. He’s on his feet before he realizes that he’s standing. “What do you really think is happening back there? You think they’re safe? Because I know that they are not.”

“Look-”

“The best case scenario is that he’s torturing him. You realize that, don’t you? While we’re here, playing at…playing at adventurers, at investigators. The best case scenario is that he’s been tortured, don’t you understand?”

“Highness-”

“I can’t breathe.” There’s a vice wrapped around his chest, squeezing. Like how tight the straightjacket had been, and squeezing tighter. “I can’t-”

The Valkyrie grabs his arms. Dully, he feels her force him to sit, to press his head between his knees.

“I know, okay? I know and it hurts me too, and I know I’m not who you want right now, I get it okay.” Her hands are warm on his shoulders, pressing down. His heart is racing. He still feels like he can’t take a full breath in. She drops her voice lower. “I know. You’re right. You are. I’m sorry. And it’s killing me too. But we can’t give up, because if there’s hope…” She stops to clear her throat. “You don’t think I want to go save him too? You don’t think…it didn’t _kill_ me when I thought you two were dead. That it didn’t make me sick when I learned what happened when Thanos had you, on Midgard. When I could have been there to stop it…and I wasn’t. It’s killing me too. But we have to hold it together, okay?”

Loki manages one deeper breath, then another. He claws himself back from the edge.

The Valkyrie squeezes his shoulders hard. “You don’t deserve this, highness. None of us do, but after everything…you least of all.”

“It’s just been…the _worst_ decade,” he manages a faltering laugh that’s still closer to being a sob. “And at each turn, when I thought we might be able to rest…”

“One day, we will.”

“You can’t know that.”

“You’re right. I don’t get to see the future. But I’m going to try and believe it for now. That we’re going to figure out whatever ‘purpose’ that mortal sorcerer is always going on about, and we’re going to be reunited with Thor and Bruce and Heimdall and I don’t know, everyone else I guess, and we’re going to kill that sorry son of a bitch and then we’ll get to rest.”

“I don’t know if it’s that easy. Because…I am fairly certain that the Norns hate me.”

“Ah, they’re bitches. Who cares what they think anyways. Just pretend.”

Loki closes his eyes. He imagines it, for just a moment. Thor’s arms closing around him. Sleeping without nightmares. Having a home that he did not feel was going to be torn away in the next moment.

He opens his eyes. A tear trails down his cheek.

“I’m sorry.” Now that the panic’s faded, he feels rather foolish that he had reacted so badly to finding this overgrown ruin. It feels like an overreaction in hindsight.

“Don’t be. If I’m being honest, I’ve been long ready for you to lose it.” She lets go of his shoulders and sits back.

“Thanks.”

“No, I just mean…you used to have these episodes back on the Ark. I thought it was only logical that you’d have them even worse now that…”

“You’re right. You should have seen me after…it took a lot of effort to even half put myself back together.” He wipes the wetness from his cheeks.

“I don’t know about you, but I could _seriously_ use a drink right now.”

Loki laughs. “Yes.”

“So swear it - when this is all over, we’re going to get absolutely plastered and make Thor scoop us out of the gutter.”

“I so swear it.” They sit in silence for a while, as Loki shakes off the lingering jitters of the panic attack, as he carefully breathes to further calm himself down.

“We should meet back up with Wanda and Sam,” Loki says finally, still a little shaky. “It will be getting dark soon.”

“Yeah. Come on.” The Valkyrie wipes suspiciously at her own eyes. “We’re going to be okay, highness.”

“I think we need to start camping out,” T’Challa declares that night. “There have been more structures, the farther out we get. We saw a crumbling tower today. They found a ruined temple. They’re getting more complex than what we’ve seen so far. More of those shadowed people. I cannot help but think that we are limiting ourselves by returning here each day.”

The copse of trees, while exposed out on the plains, has come to feel like a place of refuge. It is quiet, no ghostly shadows have appeared, there doesn’t seem to be any strange properties to it. It is really the only sure thing they have here. Leaving it overnight seems risky. Like it wouldn’t be there if they took their eyes off of it and let it be swallowed by the darkness that descends each night. They still feared that there might be things that meant them harm out there. And they didn’t want to risk calling further attention to themselves, not when they might not be able to defend themselves.

“We’re going to have to start camping overnight,” Strange says. “I wish I could be more helpful, but opening that portal took all my strength. I wouldn’t be able to do it regularly enough to help us explore.”

“I agree,” Loki says. “We should conserve as much magic as we can for emergencies, given that it does not seem to replenish itself as readily as it would in the living world.”

“So the question really is, whether we do it in groups, like we have been. Or do we all set out together?” Bucky asks.

“I would not want any of us to become permanently separated,” Wanda says hesitantly. She’s pulled out of her grief since those first black days, but she now is even more anxious about losing the others.

“Wanda’s right,” Sam says. “I think there’s strength in numbers too.”

“And besides, I believe that this sanctuary has done what it could for us. It is time for us to pursue this question further. I don’t think we can do that if we remain hiding here,” T’Challa says firmly. “We should pack up our things, and set out into this plain until we find the answers we seek.”

Sam nods. “Let’s take one more day. We’ll come up with a route.”

“We might even be able to make some weapons,” Bucky glances up at the branches of the trees.

“Great. So day after tomorrow, we take off to camp out there.”

The night before their expedition, there is a storm.

Loki is asleep with the Valkyrie’s arm draped over his chest, when the first roll of thunder sounds in the distance. He jerks awake, forgetting where he was for a minute, with Thor’s name on his lips. Electric blue lightning flashes, and the next boom of thunder is louder, waking everyone else.

“It’s a storm,” Bucky, who was on watch, says. “That’s weird.”

There is no rain. It’s just wind buffeting their small sanctuary and black clouds sparkling with lightning. They keep to a tight crowd in the center of the copse and wait for the storm to pass them by.

It does. The winds die down and the lightning fades.

It’s stupid. It’s so stupid that Loki’s eyes prickle with tears when the lightning goes. So stupid that he wishes he could call it back.

They try to get back to sleep, but Loki finds he can’t.

“Are you okay?” The Valkyrie whispers to his back. Loki cannot speak. He opens his mouth but the words don’t come. She gets up and sits beside him. She doesn’t say anything else but sits with him until the sky starts to lighten.

In the morning, there is no evidence of the storm’s destruction. Everything as it was before it rolled through.

They question whether or not they should still go.

“Just because there was a little storm, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep going,” Peter says. He seems strangely eager, more than the others.

“It may be a sign that we’re running out of time,” Loki says gravely. The storm has put him in a foul mood. That dull ache in his chest is worse than ever, opening up a yawning pit of grief and longing. “Something is _wrong_. With this place. With us. If I am right, and Thanos’s victory has fractured the paradigm of life and death itself…it may already be unravelling. This may be the end, and this storm make be the first time.”

They all remain silent for a moment, thinking over what Loki has said.

“I think we should go,” Sam says. “Be ready to retreat here if we need to.”

“I think I can get us back here if needed,” Strange says.

“Agreed,” Bucky says.

Peter confers with his friends and they agree. They all come to the conclusion that it is better to push forward, storm or no.

So at midday they set out into the wilds of this realm.

Their first day and night away from the copse of trees is fairly uneventful. They make it to the edge of their map in the direction they agreed showed the most promise and set up camp near the crumbling tower that T’Challa and Bucky had discovered. They set extra watches that night, but nothing happens.

That doesn’t mean they feel comforted. On the contrary, their camp in the middle of the plains feels unsettlingly exposed, with nothing but emptiness around them. The trees provided at least the illusion of shelter and protection. Out here there was nothing.

“So did anyone actually get any rest last night?” Peter asks when they’re breaking down camp.

“I had very strange dreams,” Drax admits. “And it was difficult to get back to sleep after my watch.”

“It felt like someone was watching me,” Wanda says. “But I think it was just my imagination. The darkness all around us…it was unsettling.”

“What about you, highness?” the Valkyrie asks later when they’re walking side by side.

“Of course, I always have terrible dreams.” She raises an eyebrow at him. “But yes, they were of a different character than my usual nightmares. Cryptic. What did you dream of?”

The Valkyrie sets her gaze on the horizon. “I dreamed of a fire.”

Little changes around them. There are trees again, and they do indeed see more figures drifting through the grass, as shadowy and mysterious as ever.

They settle down to sleep that night. By that point they’ve let their guard down a little. They think they might have been rather foolish to fear camping away from their trees. It’s the same empty plains as ever, what could possible mean them harm in this desolate place?

Unfortunately, they are wrong.

Loki goes to sleep after a first, uneventful watch. He is tired from the day’s walking and falls quickly to sleep. Quickly into a nightmare.

He’s had this one so many times he’s almost bored of it. He is bound head to toe in his cell aboard the Raft. The straightjacket pins his arms close to his torso, makes it hard to take in a deep breath. He has to kneel. The cuffs on his ankles are cold against his skin. Chains pin him down, clink as he shifts to try and comfort himself. That hateful muzzle is firm against his jaw, the mouthpiece trapping his tongue.

It is darkness and he hears screaming. The echoes of screams from Sanctuary.

_It’s not real_ , he thinks and rocks himself in his chains. _It’s not real. You are going to wake up soon._

“It is real,” Thanos’s voice whispers in his ear, so close Loki can feel the vibrations of his growl. “You are bound and helpless. Just as you always have been.” Loki jerks in the chains. “I’m going to kill your brother. No - I’m going to make an _example_ out of him. He’s been troublesome…of course you know that he has been working as hard as he can to ruin my victory. Two peas in a pod, you are. You only exist to vex me. It’s unfortunate that you did not live long enough for me to fulfill my promise to you - to make you wish for the sweet touch of pain. But I’ll at least get to deliver my retribution to your brother.”

_Leave him alone!_ Loki wants to shout, but the gag is effective.

“I’ll punish him twice for your absence. He’ll take on your sentence for your failure.”

Loki struggles harder at the restraints, but they do not budge. His chest hurts, a little ball of ache, just under his sternum, a little below the jagged scar left by the Kursed blade.

Thanos begins to laugh. His deep voice fills the tight space of the cell, reverberating off the walls.

A sudden shock of pain. It’s beyond the ache he’s been feeling, it’s sharp and real, like he has been struck hard with a blade. Pain shoots up the left part of his chest, his shoulder, onto his neck.

The restraints fall away. Thanos vanishes. Loki drops to his hands and knees, collapsing when his left arm, still burning in pain, fails to support his weight. In the darkness, Loki is alone.

“This is a dream,” he says firmly. “This is a _dream_.”

“This is a dream.” Thor’s voice.

Loki lifts his head, fights to get to his feet. “Thor? Brother?”

“I’m here,” Thor says from behind him. Loki turns and his eyes widen.

Thor stands before him, looking worn and tired. And covered in blood. It seeps from an ugly wound on his chest and shoulder, wrapping up towards his neck. The exact path of pain that Loki feels.

“You’re too late,” Thor says. “I did my best. I always do my best…it just never is enough.”

“Thor…” Loki tries to reach out for him, but something stops him. “What’s going on? Where are you?”

“It’s too late. It’s all falling apart now.” The blood keeps flowing. “Goodbye, Loki.”

“Wait-”

Loki comes awake with his breath caught in his chest and a scream building in his throat. He chokes on it, but must make enough of a sound to wake the Valkyrie, sleeping at his side.

“Loki?” she murmurs. “You okay?”

Loki fights to get control over his body, to answer or move, free himself from the tangle of the cape he’d been using as a blanket. He chokes on any answer he tries to make, his throat sealed by raw terror. Terror, when he realizes the pain in his chest and shoulder is just as bad as it had been in the dream. The pain has not faded at all.

“Loki!”

He manages to escape the tangle of fabric and stagger to his feet, stumbling back from her. He’s woken the others by now, but they all hang back to let the Valkyrie deal with him.

She moves quickly, following him with her hands raised in surrender. “Loki, just breath, it’s okay-”

“I can’t-” he manages to choke out.”

“It’s okay, it was a nightmare, just breathe.” She lowers her voice to a low murmur. “You can. You can breathe.” It’s what Thor would say, calming him down after nightmares on the Ark. She’s trying to mirror him, but the comparison just makes it even worse.

“No…it’s not…” He fights to take a deep breath. “Not a nightmare.”

“You’re having a panic attack,” Sam says gently from behind him. “You’ve had these before, you know you’re not dying, it’s okay-”

Loki’s hand shakes as he presses it to the strip of pain in his shoulder. “Not a nightmare. Something’s happened. My chest-”

“Just a panic attack. You need to calm down, you need to sit-”

“No, _Thor-”_

“I know you want your brother,” the Valkyrie says gently. “I know, and I’m sorry-”

“No, something’s wrong, I think something’s wrong.” Perhaps it was just a nightmare. But the unceasing pain would suggest otherwise. Would suggest something terrible has happened.

The bands around his chest tighten until he can no longer speak. His head swims, vision blackening at the edges. He lets them force him to sit.

“You’re panicking,” the Valkyrie whispers soften to him. “It’s okay.”

When he can breathe again, he’s shaking like a leaf and drenched in sweat. The pain has still not faded, even as the tightness in his chest lets up. “I know what a panic attack feels like.” He forces himself to a measured calm. “That was not a panic attack, or a nightmare. Something’s happened. Something’s happened to _Thor_.”

He tells them about his nightmare, about the persistent pain in his shoulder.

“My chest has been hurting since we’ve been here, here.” He points to the place on his sternum. “This is different.” He presses his hand back to his shoulder. “Something’s wrong.”

The Valkyrie hesitates. “Are you sure it wasn’t just a nightmare?”

“Yes,” he spits. He keeps rubbing at his shoulder, finding no relief. “You’re not listening-”

“Okay, okay,” she surrenders.

“Your shoulder really hurts?” Sam asks. Loki nods. “Okay, why don’t we just take a look?” They pry his hand away from his shoulder, peeling back his shirt. When they expose the skin there is an angry red stripe of skin. A welt, running from his chest, up his shoulder and to his neck.

The Valkyrie runs her fingers over it and Loki shivers, wincing. “Okay. What the fuck?”

“Do you believe me now?”

“Hey Strange,” Sam says. “You should probably take a look at this.”

The others have all hung back to give them space. Now, something else pulls their attention away.

“There’s something out there,” Wanda says. She takes a step forward.

Bucky, who had been watching with sympathy the scene, suddenly feels the hair on the back of his neck stand up, a clear and familiar warning.

“Uh,” Peter Parker says. “Guys…”

And then they’re attacked.

The shadow creatures scream and distort as they lay siege to their small camp. They appear made of smoke but have long talons, and sharp teeth when they gape their maws.

Luckily, they’re far from defenseless. They’ve got long sticks made from branches and a few knives Loki conjured.

“What are these things?” Bucky cries as he spears one with a branch. It disappears with a howl as he’s run through. Similarly, two that Peter Parker traps with webs disappear, only to have four more enter the fray.

“I don’t know,” Wanda cries. Her magic flickers at her hands. It takes effort to use it, but she manages to destroy six before they’re replaced.

“I don’t know what they are,” Drax roars. He wildly swings his sharpened branch. “But there are more of them.”

Sam is knocked back. Loki covers him with a bolt of magic, then has to drop to a knee as the pain in his shoulder spikes.

“We have to get out of here,” Strange cries. “We can’t hold them for long.” He stands, arms spread and starts to gather the power required to conjure a portal.

“You all need to go!” A small, female voice says. Gamora. Peter’s hallucination. He turns towards her, standing in the tall grass. “You went the wrong way. You must run.”

“What the hell?” Sam says, ducking under a creature as it lunges. “Where did that little girl come from?”

Peter realizes with a jolt that everyone else can see Gamora. They’re all looking at her with plain confusion on their face as they struggle with the creatures. All except Strange, who has his eyes closed, concentrating on conjuring the portal.

“Quill,” Drax’s eyes are wide. “Is that-?”

“You have to go!”

“I’m _trying_.” Strange redoubles his efforts. Gold sparks swirl in the start of a spiral. It opens wider and wider, until it is almost as tall as Strange himself. Through the portal, the copse of trees remains quiet and still. “Quickly!”

Loki stands, tucking his left arm against his abdomen. “Everyone get down.” He conjures a forcefield of green light. It ripples out from him, driving the creatures back and leaving the others alone. They quickly rise to retreat through the portal.

When most are through, Loki drops his forcefield and sways. The Valkyrie grabs him by the upper arms and bodily tosses him through the portal.

Peter is still hesitating, frozen by the realization that Gamora was real, not just a hallucination.

She nods at him. “I will show you the way.”

“Quill!” the Valkyrie cries, halfway through Strange’s portal. “Come on. You can chase your ghost later.”

“Come on, Quill!” Drax grabs his arm, pulls him towards the portal.

He looks back to Gamora. “Go!” She cries. “I will show you the way.”

“Gamora, what-”

She just shakes her head and vanishes. In her place a creature lunges for his throat. Wanda kills it and Peter turns away, letting himself be dragged back to the copse of trees.

Strange is last through, slipping into the portal just as it collapses.

For a long time, they all sit in a tense, stunned silence, trying to catch their breaths.

“What the fuck was that?” Bucky growls.

“Was anyone injured?” Sam asks breathlessly. “Anyone?”

In turn, they all shake their heads, though Loki’s hand is still pressed to his shoulder where the welt had appeared and his mouth is set into a thin line. Strange looks faint, drenched in sweat and pale, but waves off concern even as he fights to catch his breath.

“What were those things?” Peter Parker asks. “I mean, they kind of just looked like the regular shadow figures, but then they like…shifted.”

“And how could they attack us? None of the rest have been solid.”

“Wraiths of some kind,” Loki says. “They looked like wraiths. I dealt with similar, a long time ago.” He’s still breathless. “I believe they may be another symptom of the dissolution of this place. The wrongness of our presence here. Like the storm. We are not meant to be here. None of this is meant to happen. The fabric of reality is tearing apart, and I feel as though those wraiths are part of that.”

“Could they be consuming other souls? Like us? Would others be attacked out there?”

“Maybe,” Loki says. “Others, less prepared than us, yes, may have been consumed by the creatures. It’s possible.”

“They never attacked us here,” Strange says. “We violated some law by remaining in the darkness out there.”

“It’s like this world is rejecting us,” Mantis says. “It is not happy we are here.”

“So did something we do summoned them? Or was it just us being out there?” Sam asks.

“Could it have something to do with your nightmare?” The Valkyrie touches Loki’s uninjured shoulder. He shakes his head.

“And the important question,” T’Challa says. “Can they follow us back here?”

“But who the hell was that little girl? Could she have brought them?” Bucky’s eyes are on Peter. As are, a moment later, everyone else’s.

“That was Gamora.” Peter scrubs a hand over his mouth. “But like, little for some reason? I don’t know why she’s a kid, but she always appears like-”

“You’ve seen her before?” Drax asks.

He nods. “I thought I was just seeing things, you know? That’s why I didn’t tell you guys, I just thought I was going crazy. Started with dreams, then she’d appear out in the grass. I feel like…I feel like she wants me to follow her.”

“‘I’ll show you the way,’ she said,” Strange recalls.

“And that we had gone the wrong way,” Loki says.

“Okay, but why the hell hasn’t she just showed up and told us the way? I mean, seriously, what the fuck?” The Valkyrie throws up her hands. “We’ve just been wandering around here, with no idea what we’re doing and some child ghost of your dead girlfriend shows up to tell us we’ve had it wrong this whole time?”

Peter shakes his head. “Kinda cryptic, isn’t it?” They exchange a look and the Valkyrie takes a step back, seemingly cowed. Loki frowns at this interaction, but doesn’t press it.

“And what? Do we just wait for her to show up again and show us the way?”

“There are…things we might be able to do. To summon her here,” Loki says. “I’m certainly missing ingredients, but if you give me some time, I might have the power again to do the ritual.”

“When can you do it?”

“When it gets light. I should have the power then.”

“Are you sure-”

“I’ll be fine, Valkyrie. Just give me a few hours.” After a moment she nods.

In truth, he’s not sure if he’ll have the power to do it. But he’s determined to, through the pain in his shoulder. The dream still haunts him. There’s a pit of dread in his stomach that won’t go away. He’s afraid.

_What has happened? What’s happened to Thor?_

He’d destroy his own magic to have the chance to get back there and save his brother.

“ _I lay my magic down to defeat him, it would be a worthy sacrifice.”_

_“Loki, there is no worthy sacrifice for this. I need you to promise me, that you will do everything in your power to survive.”_

He looks away, so the others don’t see how his eyes fill with tears. He bites down on his lip hard enough to draw blood. The coppery taste fills his mouth.

The Valkyrie comes to sit with him. “How’s your shoulder?”

“Getting better.”

“And the dream?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know.

She squeezes his shoulder and sits with him through the night.

At first light, Loki stands in the center of the trees. He closes his eyes, his lips moving in the words of the spell. There’s a step he’s skipped, to make the spirit more stable, but he hopes the strength of his own memories is enough to make up for it.

It hurts, to dig into his scant memories of Gamora. They are laden with fear and rank desperation. He can almost smell the blood in his nose. His heart races. But he takes another deep breath and thinks of the vision he conjured to find the Soul Stone. It’s a far more sympathetic memory.

It works. Or perhaps the spirit is just tired of their stumbling around.

Gamora appears lingering at the edge of the copse of trees. She smiles and turns into the grass.

“Okay,” Peter says. He looks to the Valkyrie. “Ready to go?”

She nods.

“Let’s go then,” Loki says, stepping forward.

“Are you _sure_ you don’t want us to come with you?” Sam says, looking uncomfortable. They’d decided it shortly before the dawn. It didn’t go down easy, but eventually everyone agreed that it made the most sense for a scouting group to split off to start following Gamora, while the others remained and guarded their sanctuary.

“Larger numbers may have attracted their attention,” Strange reasoned. “We scouted in pairs, or groups of three.”

“So three of us should go.”

It was a natural conclusion of who to go. Peter needed to follow Gamora. They needed Loki to go in case the spirit vanished. Valkyrie wasn’t about to let Loki out of her sight. It takes a bit more arguing, but in the end they make everyone see reason.

They said their goodbyes before first light, just in case.

“I believe it makes more sense to protect and maintain our shelter here.” Loki settles the cape around his shoulders. His left one still twinges. “And with only three of us, I should be able to get us back here if anything happens.” It would hurt. It would take most of what he had. But he could. “Let’s go.”

They set out into the grass, following a ghost.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the lateness and for possibly any typos. I've been having sort of a...poor brain week and couldn't face...actually reading my own writing? I may have missed some typos or formatting things in the midst of my current weirdness. 
> 
> Next week, we'll continue chasing the ghost. 
> 
> Have a good weekend!


	7. The River Journey

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki, the Valkyrie, and Peter Quill make their way down a mysterious river and meet several unexpected figures.

_“I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it's just too much. The current's too strong.”_

_-Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go_

Their walk is mostly quiet, only populated by the fall of their footsteps and Peter’s occasional directions when he catches a glimpse, far ahead, of Gamora’s small shape leading them on. As they move farther and father away from their camp, a fog rolls in, settling around them like a grey blanket. Loki doesn’t know if this means they are on the right track or not. At least they have so far, not been attacked by any shadow creatures.

Peter presses forward, excited or desperate or both, and Loki and Valkyrie fall a bit farther behind.

“How is your shoulder?” she asks.

“Not as bad as it was.” He can use his arm now, though the ache - and it’s potential source - still trouble him.

He walks along, distracted by his fears, when Valkyrie speaks again. “I have something to confess.”

“Oh?” Loki glances over at her. She looks straight ahead, her expression unreadable.

“I had a vision.”

Loki raises his brow. “And with all your complaints about witches?”

“And they are truly the worst. A witch is definitely involved in this one. Do you remember when I fell into that coma? On the Ark? And I lied to you about remembering what happened?”

“So you knew I saw through your lies?” She nods. “I’m assuming you’re about to tell me what you saw.”

“Sort of. That’s where it started at least.”

So she tells him. About the road to Hel and the nameless giantess and her fire, and the raven, and the prophecy. And about seeing her on Vormir and her warning.

“Not alone. And not in time. But we might save the Universe. That’s all. No actual useful advice. As per usual, when it comes to prophetic visions.”

“It does seem to make sense…” Loki rubs his chin. “That we will suffer, but perhaps save the world if we push forward, not give up or turn back. Basic advice, rather.”

“I thought it was bullshit, after the first vision. Thought it was just a weird dream, though it felt different from the other nightmares I got stuck in. Until I found myself the fucking Queen of Asgard that I realized that it was truly prophecy.”

“I wish you had told me.”

“Would it really have helped? To know that we wouldn’t stop Thanos in time?”

“I don’t know. But…we need all the information we can get. I don’t like secrets.”

“I know. But…there’s something else.”

“What?”

“I saw your mother.”

Loki stops short. _“What?”_

Valkyrie stops. “Yeah. I thought that might hit a nerve. I didn’t want…I thought it might hurt, so I didn’t want to tell you unless it was necessary.”

“I’ve never…” Loki’s shoulder throbs. “And I’ve tried. Not even in my dreams, and I’ve practiced magic for centuries, why have I not-” He stops short, to control the shake in his hands.

“I’m sorry,” Valkyrie says, and means it. “I know how much you want to see her.”

“It’s not your fault. You didn’t ask for this.” He’s still feeling uncharitably bitter and tries to let it go. “It doesn’t seem fair. But we both know none of this has been fair.”

“No, it hasn’t.”

“Why are you telling me this now?”

She shrugs“No way out but through. No way to save the universe but forward. But the end of the path is misery. I thought when she said it that it was just about Vormir. About finding Gamora and that Thanos had gained the Soul Stone. But I’ve been wondering, since we decided to follow this ghost…”

“That it might apply now as well. A double prophecy.” Loki starts forward. Peter’s far ahead of them now.

“Perhaps.”

Loki touches the ache in his shoulder. “There is a long road ahead.”

“I just thought we should be prepared for the worst.”

“No way out but forward.” But when Loki tries to think of the worst case scenario, he feels such a deep despair in his soul that he doesn’t know how he’ll be able to go on.

They’ve almost caught up with Peter when he turns and calls back. “Hey! There’s something in the fog up here!”

What emerges from the fog is a river, wide and fast flowing. The water is clear, reflecting the purple light in the sky. There is a narrow dock and tied to the dock is a boat, with a single oar.

“I think we’re supposed to get in this thing.” Peter frowns at the boat. “She disappeared right here.”

“Huh. Interesting.” Valkyrie looks at Loki. “No path but forward, right, highness?”

“I suppose.”

Peter’s expression twitches. “So you finally told him about that witch lady on Vormir, huh?”

Loki studies the boat intently. It is well made, looking neither new nor old. There is no decorative markings on the wood at all. “I wonder who constructed this craft.”

That’s a rather alarming thought. But the three of them exchange a look and then Loki leads the way, stepping up onto the dock with a cool confidence. Peter follows, and Valkyrie takes up the rear.

Peter takes up the oar. “Okay. Great. Now do we go across or-” As he talks, the shape of Gamora appears on the opposite bank, but much farther downstream. “Okay. Or down the river. Let’s go.”

Valkyrie slips the securing rope off the dock and they take off down the river. Soon the fog swallows them and they are out of sight of the dock.

Their journey down the river is almost peaceful. It’s quiet, except for the waves lapping at the sides of the boat. The fog clears, leaving them with views of the wide plains on either side of the riverbank. The river itself remains smooth and unchanging as they drift along, each taking a turn at the oar.

“The light’s not changing much, right?” Peter says. “I feel like it would have gotten darker by now.”

“I don’t know.” Valkyrie frowns. “But who knows about time here?”

“If our pattern of day and night has shifted,” Loki says. “I hope that means we are on the right track.”

“Kind of creepy.”

Valkyrie snorts. “We’re following the child ghost of your dead girlfriend, this was already creepy.”

“Yeah. I’m real weirded out by the child thing, I can _not_ figure that out.” Just as he says it, she appears on the bank a little ahead, coaxing them on. She only ever appears for a moment at a time before disappearing, but serves as reassurance that they’re heading in the right direction.

A little while later, there comes a split in the river, a smaller section breaking off from the main waterway.

Valkyrie is at the oar. “So which way?”

“There.” Peter points down the offshoot, where Gamora is just disappearing into the grass. Valkyrie steers them down to the right.

Before the terrain fully separates them from the main part of the river, Loki turns his head and sees a massive, three-mast ship floating in the distance, away from them. He hears in his mind the same drumbeat he heard when his body was dying in Wakanda. He has to close his eyes against a sudden dizziness. When he opens them, the ship is gone and the drumbeat faded.

“Are you all right?” Valkyrie sounds unnerved. He nods.

“What the hell was that?” Peter asks. Neither of them have an answer.

They continue down this inlet for some time. Gamora’s appearances increase in frequency as the landscape changes around them, from the empty plains to rocky, mountainous. There are more shadows and Loki for a moment is reminded of Svartalfheim, a truly unwelcome comparison. They’re all on edge, watching for anything unexpected. Loki even manages to build himself up into a sick anxiety that Thanos is going to come around some corner for them. This is the first real trail they’ve found since ending up in this strange realm, perhaps the first one since Thanos started collecting the Stones in earnest. Surely they are not going to be allowed to continue on the path towards defeating him? Surely, with the way Loki’s luck has been for the past decade, they will not be allowed to hope?

His shoulder twinges. The welt stings.

Despite the pain, he volunteers to take up the oar from Peter and that is enough to distract him for the time being.

Not long into Loki’s turn piloting, Peter gestures at the shore. “Hey. She’s not going away.”

“She’s not.”

“I guess we’re landing,” Valkyrie says.

Loki steers the boat towards where Gamora is waiting on the shore. They scrape the bottom of the river and jump out into the water to pull it ashore. The ghostly child of Gamora just watches them patiently as they secure the boat.

“You won’t need it again,” she says once they’ve finished. “Come on.”

“Are you going to tell us where we’re going?” Valkyrie asks.

“You’ll see.”

Peter has already started after her. Valkyrie exchanges a suspicious look with Loki and they follow.

There’s a path worn away in the rocks. The rocks gradually grow more dense as they approach the base of the mountains. The path winds through them, then rounds a corner.

Valkyrie stops short. “Oh. Shit. I know this place. You have got to be kidding me.”

“Oh yeah,” Peter says. “This does kind of look like…”

“What does it look like?” Loki is just behind Peter rounding the corner. He freezes in his tracks, eyes widening as he takes in the sight.

The path opens up into a wide valley. In the valley, shadowed by the jagged peaks of the mountains, lie hundreds of corpses. It’s a battlefield, soaked in blood and death. There are weapons and banners sticking up out of the mud, flags fluttering in the breeze.

“What is this?” Loki gasps. “What-”

“It’s okay,” Valkyrie grabs his shoulder. “It’s all right, highness.”

“How in the Nine is this possibly-”

“It’s fine.” She meets his gaze. “I’ve been here before.”

Breathless, Loki says, “Been here?” He looks back at the corpses on the battlefield. Some are wearing silver armor, torn blue capes draped over them. “What is this, a memory, an illusion?”

“I don’t know. I don’t…I don’t think so,” Valkyrie answers. “I think this is just where she lives.” She elaborates at Loki’s blank expression. “The giant. The witch from my vision.”

“For the record, I did not see the dead bodies last time.” Peter looks faintly green.

“Yeah. Well. The first time, this is where she appeared in the end.” Valkyrie cuts off, looking to the battlefield with a thoughtful expression on her face.

“Okay. We keep going…right?” Peter looks to Gamora, who nods.

“Let’s go. We’re running out of time. And there is going to be a lot to do.” Gamora turns her back on them and starts to pick her way through the battlefield, holding up her skirts carefully.

“The giantess,” Loki swallows. “The witch. You are sure she did not-”

“She was profoundly fucking unhelpful. No offense meant to your family, highness, but am I really sick to death of prophecy. I told you all she said to me. Just that we might save the universe, but not in time. And that we must move forward.” She casts a disgusted glance down at the bloodstained battlefield. “There’s certainly suffering enough in the path.”

About halfway across the battlefield there is a burnt, barren tree. And a raven perched on the branch, cocking it’s head at Valkyrie. It bobs with excitement as they approach.

“Hello, you stupid bird, Valkyrie says and holds out her arm.

The raven caws, sounding rather pleased. “Brynhild!” It hops onto her arm. “Dead Queen!”

“Yes, yes, I’m the new Queen of the Dead. The nickname stuck.” She ruffles its feathers and it preens. “An improvement over the old one, don’t you think?”

“A vast improvement,” Loki agrees. He’s ghost white, watching all of this with a wide eyed expression of shock on his face. “Particularly if it means that you have supplanted Hela, and we will not run into her at any point in our stay in this realm.”

“I don’t think we will. Haven’t seen her at least, the other two times I ended up on this path. Have you seen her?” she asks the bird.

“Witch! Witch!” The bird bounces up and down. It flaps its wings and pulls on the Valkyrie’s arm.

“Helpful.”

“This way,” Gamora says impatiently. They follow her across the rest of the battlefield, to where the path through the rocks picks back up.

“Witch!” The raven excitedly chirps again.

“What, that giant we talked to last time? Is that who we’re going to see?” Peter asks.

“Witch!”

The path winds up a bit, to a short set of stone steps. Gamora stops there and gestures them up. The steps lead to an open stone platform overlooking the battlefield, where a roaring fire has been build up. The warmth of it instantly seeps into the bones after so long being devoid of feeling anything in this strange place. Valkyrie doesn’t even think she’ll mind seeing the giantess, she’s so grateful for the warmth of her fire.

But this is not the giantess’s fire.

The figure that sits beside it, covered in a black cloak, is far too small to be the giantess. In the moment that the three of them are all savoring the warmth of the fire, the figure stands and casts aside the hood of her cloak to reveal long, curling blond hair, clear blue eyes, and a patient smile.

Loki chokes. “Mother?”

Back in the copse of trees all is quiet. Those that remain feel rather useless in the three’s departure. All except Strange, who sits by the large tree in the center, calm and collected.

“You really think they’re headed on the right track?” Sam asks.

“I can’t think anything else,” Strange says. “We haven’t gotten anywhere else. And my vision was clear.”

“What if your vision was wrong?” Bucky asks.

“Then we’ll…have to come up with something else.”

“They have been gone a long time,” T’Challa notes. “I feel as though that is perhaps a good sign. If they had lost the trail, or run into a dead end, they would have come back already.”

“Or they just walked into a trap,” Wanda says with a frown.

“Gamora would not have led them astray. She was a good leader. Far, far better than Quill,” Drax says.

“But maybe that wasn’t Gamora. What if it were just an illusion?” Wanda says.

Strange looks at her plainly. “Did it feel like an illusion to you?”

She hesitates a moment before shaking her head. “No. It didn’t.”

“There are things here, powers moving here, that we don’t yet understand. That we may never understand. But we have to trust that we are doing the right thing. We just have to continue onwards and trust that fate will find a way.”

“That doesn’t necessarily help wanting to go after them,” Bucky says. “But for now, we wait.”

Loki would be embarrassed. He can feel their eyes on him, Valkyrie with an amused upturn, Peter wide and confused, and he knows he should really try to pull himself together. It’s just that he can’t stop crying.

“I’m sorry,” he manages to choke out around the tears, when he can. “I’m _sorry_.”

“Shh,” Frigga whispers patiently, rubbing his back. “It’s all right, darling.”

“It’s not, I-”

“It is. What’s past is past. For my part, I’m sorry for the wrongs we did you. And I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you. From all that happened, and all that is to come.”

“Uh, all that is to come?” Peter squeaks. “Do you think you could be a bit more specific? The bird said you were a witch, are you seeing something we’re not…”

Loki wipes the tears from his eyes, fighting for a bit more control.

“I am a witch, Peter Quill. But this is a bit different from prophecy. I’ve been tasked to prepare you for what’s next.” She cups Loki’s cheek. “Because all is not lost. And they are very angry at Thanos.”

“So you know what’s going on, your majesty? We’re not trapped here.”

“Strange - the mortal sorcerer - he said that his vision showed him we must be brought here.”

“He was correct. Or rather, he was guided. By the forces of fate. Because you were also right, my son. This would be the end of the universe if a series of events hadn’t worked out precisely correctly to bring _you_ here, now. You here,” She moves her hand to his chest. “With a strong magical bond.”

Loki opens his mouth to defend his actions, but Frigga continues before he can.

“Because it is true that at a certain point, Thanos’s victory became inevitable. Capturing so many of the Stones was like the rocks that skitter down to start a landslide. One of catastrophic proportions. There was nothing anyone could do to prevent it - not even the Norns themselves.” The fire crackles beside her. “But there are bigger things in the universe than Thanos. And even if they could not stop him, they can still unravel his work. You were right. Thanos’s wish of the Stones - to destroy half of all life - has ruined the boundary between life and death. It has thrown the entire universe into chaos. The physical, the spiritual, time, space, matter - all of it is sliding towards complete annihilation.”

“Okay, that actually sounds worse than I thought,” Peter says, looking pale.

“On the side of the living, there is going to be only more death, as whole cultures finally collapse. The universe will stagger, then grow cold, if we do not reverse the destruction Thanos has caused, and scattered the Stones to the corners of the universe again.”

“How?” Valkyrie asks. “If they didn’t have the power to stop him, how can they have the power to stop him now?”

“They can’t. You all - all of you, together - have a chance. They can reverse Thanos’s victory and give you a head start but his final end will be up to all of you. They can offer you a reset.”

“Like a do over?” Peter asks.

Frigga smiles. “Yes. A do over, if you prefer. The connection cultivated by your magic will serve as the anchor. Yes,” She cuts Loki off as he opens his mouth to explain again. “Entwining magic as you did can be dangerous, sometimes fatally poisonous. But, in this case, it will also be the universe’s salvation. The Norns saw that Thanos was gathering power too quickly to be stopped. And they also saw you and your brother, bound together with powerful magic. A subtle twist of fate, right at the end, and you were separated, to create an anchor, a way to stitch what has been torn back together again.” She looks to Loki with sadness in her eyes. “I can’t promise that it will be an easy path.”

“What else is there to do? I may not be the most heroic person in the Nine, but even I would not doom the universe to demise because I could not handle a little suffering. Besides,” Loki swallows. “I cannot see how it could be worse than what I have suffered before.”

“I know.” Frigga drops her hand to his and squeezes. “I am so sorry.”

“Frigga. It’s getting late.” The giantess has come up the steps into their platform. “They are waiting.”

Loki’s hand tightens on his mother’s, but he forces himself to let go as they follow the giantess away from the warm fire.

When the others are down the steps and away, Loki stops, turns and grabs Frigga’s hand again. “Mother-”

“I’m sorry. I wish we had more time. I do. There is so much I would need to apologize for.”

“You don’t-”

“I do. I should have protected you. We never should have lied to you. I wish I could do it all again.” She touches his chest again, over the scar. He wants to tell her what he did to avenge her, but has a feeling she already knows. “I am sorry for all that you have suffered. And will. But if you can survive this…you will have peace.”

“Is that a prediction or a hope?”

“Ah, I wish the future was so clear. There have been no visions, no prophecies, since Thanos cast the universe into chaos. None of us can see beyond what the Norns have fated.” She takes a steadying breath. “Good luck. Though I know you’re strong enough to do it.”

“What of Thor?” He asks it in a whisper, afraid of the answer.

She smiles sadly and touches his shoulder. Her grip feels cool, soothing away the persistent ache in the welt. “He needs you. Don’t be afraid. He’s alive. Wounded, in body and soul, but alive. Loki, I need you to promise me something.”

“Anything.”

“You need to both survive. I don’t want to see either of you in Valhalla for a long, long time, do you understand?”

Loki nods.

“No grand self-sacrifices. And you’ll make sure Thor doesn’t do the same.”

“I feel like that promise is going to be easier said than done. You know how he gets with his notions of heroics.”

“Just try your best. I have a feeling he will listen to you now. Take care of each other. Promise.”

“I promise.”

“I love you.” She cups his cheeks and he bends his head to let her kiss his forehead. “One day, far, far in the future, we may meet again. There will be more time then.”

She leads him down the steps, where the giantess and Valkyrie are casting sideways glares at each other.

“I’ll watch out for them, your majesty.” Valkyrie offers a short bow.

Frigga smiles. “I’m aware of the magnitude of the task. I hope I won’t have to see any of you for a long, long time.”

“As much as I regret parting from you, majesty, if that means I won’t have to see this one for a long time, I think that’s a good trade off.”

“Behave yourself, Brunnhilde. No more slaving, or else we may have to have another conversation by the fire.”

“My slaving days are long behind me, I swear on the Nine.”

“Good. The good you have done has already gone a long way to clearing your name.” The giantess smiles, the first she’s ever offered. “I think this next victory might redeem you for good.”

Valkyrie nods. The raven squawks. “Dead queen. Bye-bye.”

She even smiles at the raven. “Bye, then.” She looks to Loki. “Are you ready, your highness?”

“I suppose as I ever will be.”

Peter is looking a bit pale at all of this. He claps his hands together. “Okay. Well, let’s go save the universe, right?”

It is hard to turn his back. But he does and the start up the narrow set of stone steps carved into the side of the mountain. There is one last glimpse of Gamora, by a barren and withered tree, before they round the corner and are alone again.

They climb in silence.

“Are you okay?” Valkyrie asks quietly.

“Fine,” Loki says but his voice is rough. He swallows down a lump. “I should apologize-”

“Naw.” Peter waves him off. “Seriously, don’t. You don’t need to. My mom died when I was six so like…I get it, man. Really.”

“Thank you,” Loki says after a moment.

Near the top of the tree, the steps open out onto a wider platform. There are two massive stone doors in the side of the mountain, embossed with the carving of a massive tree.

“Nice tree,” Peter says.

“That’s meant to be Yggdrasil, the world tree,” Loki says quietly. There is a thrum of power in the air, making the atmosphere feel heavy, grave. To speak in more than a soft tone feels like a violation of the space. “The Nine Realms.” He looks to his companions. “Shall we?”

“Got no where else to go.”

“I’m ready,” Valkyrie says. She steps forward first. When she’s barely touched the doors, they swing open, revealing a long dark hallway. A roughly hewn tunnel may be more appropriate a description. Loki follows a step behind Valkyrie, conjuring a witchlight to light their way, and Peter follows after him.

“It’s easier,” Loki says suddenly.

“What is?” Valkyrie whispers back.

“Magic. Doing magic…it doesn’t feel like a strain here. It feels natural…more natural than every before.” It feels like the tunnel is soaked in its own power. One that draws his forth, doesn’t stifle it like the Soul realm. It almost feels like his magic is one with the power in the tunnel. He can barely feel if he’s drawing it from himself or if he’s just coalescing something in the air.

The implication is stunning.

The hall leads them through the mountain, through twists and turns. They finally come upon a sort of doorway. There is only darkness beyond. Gamora stands, smiling patiently at them.

“You came,” she says.

“Yeah,” Peter shoots back. “We didn’t really have any other choice. You couldn’t have given us some sort of ghost ride? We’ve been walking for hours here, what, you just teleport ahead? No fair.”

She smiles and steps into the darkness. “Come on.”

There eyes take another moment to adjust to the darkness. The room - hall more like, given how massive the space feels - is lit only by faint firelight, torches on the walls and small campfires set into the floor. The edges of the room are still shrouded in blackness. They can’t see how far it extends. It is an eery feeling - like they’re floating in infinity.

In the center of the room is a raised platform. On it stands a massive loom, so large that the frame and threads disappear into the darkness.

Beside the loom are three figures, dressed in black robes that so blend in with the shadows that their figures are indistinct. They are half swirling black cloth and shadow and when they speak, it is in three voices.

“Welcome,” they say. Loki and Valkyrie drop to their knees and after standing awkwardly for a moment, Peter follows. “So, you are the ones who will fix this.”

“We are your servants,” Loki says.

“Thanos has torn apart the fabric of the universe!” They snarl. “Thanos, in his hubris, has begun the final unravelling of fate. He presumes to power he does not understand, all in the name of hollow _balance_. Even he, deep in his heart, knows his stated purpose is nothing but illusion. He desires power. He desires to be a god! But he has no understanding of what that means. He does not know balance, he does not know fate. He plays with his toys and he kills and he maims and he things he is balancing the scales. When he is only destroying it!” Their fury is plain and terrifying. They seethe with rage and it reverberates in the power around them.

Peter swallows, glancing back at the doorway, where Gamora stands watching. Her face is neutral and she doesn’t seem tense. He turns back to where the Norns hover.

“What will you have us do?”

“You. What will we have you do, prince of Asgard.” They each hold out a hand and beckon him forward. Loki gets hesitantly to his feet and approaches the dais. Valkyrie looks like she wants to follow but stays rigidly kneeling.

“We will give you another chance to stop Thanos. It will be hard, to reverse what he has done. Only possible with the power you have woven to another.” They crook their fingers and Loki gasps. A faint green wisp of magic is drawn forth from his chest, becoming like a thread that the Norns twirl around their finger. “We will bring you back. But that will not be the end. You will still have to stop him.”

“How?” Loki gasps. “If we could not stop him before? If I have failed, so many times-”

“Remember your magic, Prince.”

“My magic did not work before. How can we defeat him?”

“Remember that there is not just two. Balance must be restored to the universe. True balance, of life and death, not Thanos’s misguided sense of balance. The scale must be rebuilt. Rebuild the scale.”

“That doesn’t really make any sense,” Peter whispers. Valkyrie hits him, without taking her eyes off Loki.

“We will show you the magic required,” the Norns continue. “It will be up to you to _remember_.”

“I will.”

“It will not be easy. Returning to life is always difficult. It leaves holes in the mind. You must remember.”

Loki nods. “I will do my best.”

The Norns seem pleased with this. The anger in the air eases a bit. “That is all we can hope for. The best you can give. Remember, death is not enough. Your hand, prince.” The center figure holds out her hand. Loki, trying hard to suppress the tremor in his hand, reaches out and takes it. “Now.”

Loki holds steady for one minute, two, then his knees give way. He collapses, hand dropping from that of the Norn’s. He gasps for breath, sweating dripping down his face. Valkyrie surges to her feet and starts towards the platform, but stops herself.

“Do you see?”

“Yes,” Loki says. “I see.”

“This will hurt. It will hurt a great deal.”

“Not as much,” Loki gasps. “Not as much…” He starts to laugh. “As what Thanos has done to me.”

“As what Thanos has done to so many,” Gamora says from behind them. Her voice sounds almost like her adult voice. Peter turns but she is still in the child form.

“Fair enough,” the Norns say. “There may be some lasting effects. We have never done this before. And will never do so again. The Norns are chance. We are fate. We do not bend time, or reality, or life, or death, merely temper its flow. Never before have we so directly altered the course of history. This is your one chance. We will rend time to bring you back, but it will be up to you to finish it.”

“I am ready,” Loki gasps. He staggers to his feet, towards the loom.

“Good.”

Loki reaches out a hand to the tangled cloth in the loom. He sets his jaw. He remembers everything. He remembers all the pain, all the hopelessness. The abject despair he felt when his fall through the Void failed to take his life, when he met only more suffering at the bottom of his hole, and the touch of Thanos’s broad hand on his cheek, smearing the blood over his face. The exhaustion he felt the whole of his invasion of Earth, his bone deep fatigue and confusion. Every nightmare, every scream in the night. Every time the shadows around him warped and took shape and sent him reeling. Thor’s screams. His own grasping in the dark for any little scrap of comfort. The pain in his chest, the dull, yearning ache that has plagued him since his body turned to dust.

The threads wind around his fingers. The power takes hold of him. He sways.

A drumbeat sounds in his ears.

In the copse of trees, Wanda suddenly stands.

“What?” Sam asks. “What is it?”

Bucky steps closer to her. “What, you see something out there?”

“Sense one of those creatures?”

“No,” Strange answers instead. “It’s time.”

“Time?” T’Challa says.

A wind picks up. The branches of the trees rustle together.

“Stay close,” Sam draws the rest of them closer to the tree. T’Challa, Drax, and Bucky stay close to the perimeter, fashioned weapons held at the ready.

Thunder booms.

Loki gasps for breath, holding fast to the weaving of the spell even as sweat pours down his face from the effort. His hand not tangled in the threads is clutched to his chest as the vice tightens, crushing his lungs.

“It is time,” the Norns say. “Time to undo it.”

Something gives way. A crack, power flowing fast, out of his control.

“Do it!” The Norns cry. “Now!”

The pain is blinding. Loki can’t hold back anymore, and he screams.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright so...there's maybe a tiny bit of deus ex machina going on here, in a quite literal way. I tried my best to sort of...hint at a more powerful figure influencing events before, and hopefully it doesn't come _entirely_ out of nowhere. Depictions of the Norns were inspired by Karen Bek-Pederson's _The Norns in Old Norse Mythology_ (but, uh, rather altered to fit my own vision/narrative needs/etc). 
> 
> If I'm really honest with myself my favorite OC I've ever created is the raven. Idk, guys, I love that little funny raven. XD 
> 
> I hope you enjoyed this chapter! Next week, we're back to the apocalypse, where the arrival of Thanos on Earth has severely worsened the situation.
> 
> As always, kudos/comments/shares/frogs always appreciated! I'm very behind in replying to comments, I'm planning to catch up tonight and tomorrow. I gave myself a little fandom-summer-vacation this week, enjoying the nice weather and doing some knitting, but I'm back and will respond to all the very lovely comments as soon as I can! Happy Friday! <3


	8. Collapse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The survivors plan their last stand against Thanos, as a new phase in the apocalypse poses new challenges.

_“Since we’re imagining, why not also dream of a way for nature to prosper that doesn’t depend on our demise? We are, after all, mammals ourselves. Every life form adds to this vast pageant. With our passing, might some lost contribution of ours leave the planet more impoverished?_

_Is it possible that, instead of heaving a huge biological sigh of relief, the world without us would miss us?”_

_-Alan Weisman, The World Without Us_

It has started raining again. Thor can hear the rush of it, the strike of droplets on the roof. It’s the first thing he’s really aware of, after a long period of darkness and nothingness. He becomes aware of the rain, and of pain in his shoulder. Throbbing, radiating pain. Then it all fades out again and he slips back into unconsciousness.

He dreams this time.

Once, a long time ago, Thor lost Loki in the garden of a foreign palace. They were still children, and he had only turned his back for a second. When he turned back to the place where Loki was, he was nowhere in sight. Just a split second, and Loki had slipped away. He can still taste the panic he’d felt when he’d realized Loki was gone.

It had taken almost ten minutes for Thor to find him. He was beginning to be scared he would really have to go tell his nursemaid, who would tell his parents, and then he would be in trouble for losing his brother, who he was specifically told to watch out for. Loki was entirely oblivious to all this. He had followed a brightly colored bird through the fruit trees lining the property, in the shadow of the garden fence. Once he found him, Thor’s worry had turned instantly to anger.

“Don’t you ever do that again!” he shouted, grabbing Loki’s arm hard enough that he cried out in shock.

Loki looked up at him with his green eyes wide and watery, shocked that Thor was scolding him. “Why?”

“Because! I was supposed to watch you and I would hear it from Mother and Father if you got lost! I’m not intending on getting in trouble just because you cannot stay put for five minutes!” Loki looked stung from the rebuke. “And besides,” Thor softens. “You frightened me?”

“Why?” Loki frowned unhappily, more confused now than anything.

“Because,” Thor took a deep breath. “I didn’t know where you were. You could have been lost or hurt. I was frightened.”

“Oh,” Loki said simply. He had not apologized - even then, direct apologies were not his way - but he had stuck close to Thor for the rest of the day.

Now, as the pain and blood loss drive him back into sleep, Thor dreams of that day. The garden is not how he remembers it. Instead of the flowers and fruit, the trees are plain and towering. There are no high walls to keep them safely inside. Instead it simply dissolves into darkness at the edges. The only thing that marks it as the same place is the familiarity of the palace towering above, and the sense that Thor was supposed to be watching Loki but had somehow misplaced him.

Finding Loki this time is not just the simple panic of a ten minute search. Thor wanders through the garden for what feels like hours. There is never any sign of his brother.

He eventually realizes that he is dreaming. In that moment of lucidity, he feels the odd quality of the dream, the hum of power in the air that is common to all his dreams of the future.

_But this cannot be prophecy,_ he thinks bitterly. _This has already come true. Loki is already lost to me forever, why do you only show me what has already come to pass, that which I cannot fix or change?_

Of course there is no answer. He wanders a bit more until he realizes that the trees look just like the ones in Wakanda that he was surrounded by when Thanos snapped his fingers and destroyed the world. Where he and Steve had held a quiet vigil all that night.

He stops searching. There is no point. Loki is gone and Thor is beginning to understand he will never get him back.

Feeling weighed down by grief and loneliness, Thor sits on the forest floor and leans his back against a massive ash tree. He turns his face towards the sky, resting his head back against the bark. Sunlight filters through the leaves. It’s almost peaceful.

“Soon,” a voice whispers close in his ear.

Thor opens his eyes, heart beating fast.

There’s a moment when he’s still half in the odd dream, but then pain filters back in and wipes it from his mind. It’s been reduced to a dull throb, much better than his memories of before, but still painful. He lies flat on his back on some ratty blanket on a hard concrete floor.

He goes to move but that sends bolts of pain shooting up his neck and down his arm. He hisses in pain, then jolts when he feels a hand on his shoulder.

“Take it easy,” Steve says.

“Welcome back,” comes Natasha’s voice, from a little farther away. “You’ve been out for a while. Thought you might not be waking up again.”

“It takes more than that to kill me.”

Steve’s eyebrow twitches in disbelief. “You took a hit from the Gauntlet, man. Not many would survive that.”

The longer Thor is awake the more the pain fades. He manages to sit up, with some help from Steve, and lean back against the wall of their hiding place. An empty building, construction site by the looks of the half finished walls and scattered building materials. There are wires hanging down from the ceiling and carpets rolled up against the wall. There are windows, none of which have glass in their frames. Outside it is raining in sheets from a cold grey sky.

“What happened?” Thor manages to ask.

“Everyone made it out okay,” Clint says. He’s tucked against one of the windows, looking out. “Carol just went to see if she could pinch us some supplies, Rocket and Nebula are keeping watch. Well. Rocket’s on lookout, I think Nebula’s brooding some more.”

“Where are we?”

“The city,” Steve answers. “We managed to get away from Thanos but the ship took some damage. The compound is…lost. Destroyed. This is as far as we could make it before it failed. We ditched it in the Hudson and found this abandoned building to hide out in, until we can figure out a plan.” Steve looks tired. “Another plan.”

“Thanos can not have let us escape.”

“I think he wasn’t expecting the ship to make that sort of jump. He wasn’t ready to track it. But no, he’s not letting us get away.” Natasha pulls out her phone and shows Thor a video. Sanctuary hovers over the north part of the city. The massive spaceship is drifting closer over the buildings.

Thor nods. “Sanctuary. That’s Sanctuary.”

“Oh,” Natasha takes her phone back. “I’d been picturing a planet.

“It was both. I have only ever…experienced the ship. Loki-” Thor feels a jolt of pain that has nothing to do with the wound in his shoulder. “Said there was also a sort of…jagged moon that he held as a home base. But the ship…that is as much Sanctuary as that planet was.”

“So he’s really setting up shop,” Clint says bitterly.

“He’s made a couple statements,” Natasha says. “What we would expect. Announcing his occupation of Earth, and that that occupation would be made easier if we were handed over. He’s got it out for us - you especially, if his speech is to be believed.”

“I have escaped him three times now. I’ve wounded him. It follows that he would see my demise as the final victory.”

“And eliminating a threat,” Natasha says a crooked smile. “No one else so far has gotten even close - you’ve almost killed him.”

“And we all had the audacity to track him down on his little retirement planet,” Clint says. “We’ve made destroying us and ruling from Earth the ultimate victory.”

“Nothing’s changed. We’ve still got to fight against him. We just have to do it on the move, at a disadvantage.”

“And fast,” Natasha says seriously. “He’s going to start escalating soon.” There’s a moment of silence as they all consider what Natasha means by escalation. Destruction. Killing civilians. Using the Stones again. Who knows what else Thanos might come up with.

“We’ll think of a plan,” Steve says halfheartedly. “We always think of a plan.”

“Has anyone heard from Stark? Or Rhodes?” Thor asks, mostly to get his mind of the memories of Thanos’s tortures.

Steve shakes his head. “They’re in the wind. And Thanos would have made it public if he caught up to him. I don’t think he’s dead or captured, but I’m not going to count on his help either.”

“We haven’t been able to contact Wakanda either,” Natasha says. “But I think they’re okay for now. They stood up to him before, and Shuri said they’d started up the best shields and cloaking devices they had.”

Carol enters from the stairwell, carrying a bag. “Hey,” She grins. “You’re awake. How you feeling?”

“Oh, I’ll be fine in a few hours. Well, not entirely fine but I’ll be well enough to fight.”

Carol hands him a bottle of water. “Good to know.”

“Are you sure? That was a hard blow from the Gauntlet, not many people would have even survived that.”

“I’ll be fine. I’ll be ready.” He drinks half the bottle in a few gulps. “What do we have? In the way of weapons, transport-” Thor stops at the grim look on their faces.

“Not much,” Carol says. “What we could carry. What was already on board the ship, which took more damage thanks to Thanos and making the jump so unprepared.”

“I’m assuming my axe was left behind.”

Steve shakes his head. “Even if any of us could have lifted it, we didn’t have time. It fell when you did, into the woods. I thought it would be safer there.”

“Recovering it is important,” Natasha says. She looks to Steve. “We’ve discussed it in some of our preliminary planning. It’s a priority. We have no idea if Thanos could use it, but we need it out of his hands in any case. And it’s good transport, when we don’t have a ship.”

“I agree,” Thor says. “How bad is it? What has Thanos brought?”

They all exchange a look. “A lot,” Natasha answers. “Less than his first attack here, it does look like he was equal opportunity with his whole ’50% of the universe’ massacre. But still. More than us, considering basically…there’s just us and Wakanda. We still haven’t heard from any other government agency.”

“National Guard’s still dealing with survivors, they’re all on defense mode. Not ready to mount a defense against Thanos’s Chitauri armies.”

“The Black Order is a bigger problem,” Nebula says from the doorway. Her clothes are soaked through. She must have been brooding for quite some time, out in the rain. “They’ve been specifically tasked to track us down and bring us to Thanos.”

“Rumor has it he’s got some big plans for us,” Clint says bitterly. “Big public execution style plans.”

“Perhaps after a few months of torture.”

“She’s right,” Thor says. “Thanos likely has more planned for us than simply killing us. Unfortunately.”

The others let that hang. It’s silent for a few minutes.

“We should let you rest a bit more,” Steve says finally. “Once the rain let’s up a bit, we need to be ready to move.” He rises and goes to the window.

Thor sips at the rest of the water, accepts a packet of crackers that Carol hands him. As he sits and listens to the rain, he thinks about the dream he had, how his mind had conjured the Wakandan woods instead of that opulent foreign garden from so long ago.

It might be nothing. It might be simply his grief-stricken, traumatized mind playing games with him. But maybe it does mean something.

At hour later the rain has let up some. It still trickles, but the downpour is slowing. Thor has spent that hour thinking about his dream.

He finally announces his conclusion. “I think we have to return to Wakanda.” He explains his dream and the way that it had felt like prophecy. “I believe there’s something there that we missed. Some key at the epicenter, where it all began.” Even if there was, does he have the skill to find it? He was no true witch, not sorcerer. Magic has been beyond him since Thanos’s snap took his brother.

Steve rubs his beard. “I can’t deny that sounds…plausible. It makes some sort of sense. If we can get in contact with Bruce and Jane, they might be able to start running traces.”

“Shuri was pretty clear that they’re closing the borders, though,” Natasha points out. “She doesn’t want to put more of her people at risk and if we go back there, with Thanos on our tail…”

“We could point out that they’re going to be targets sooner or later,” Carol says. “Even if they close the borders, Thanos is going to come after them.”

“We can minimize the risks,” Natasha says. “It will mean splitting up, only a few of us going, to slip out of the city without detection.”

“But how?” Clint says. “Thanos is looking for us in every nook and cranny, those things are out there. We’ll never slip past him.”

“The Black Order are thorough,” Thor says.

“But if we had a diversion,” Carol says. “We can draw Thanos away, distract him, while you and maybe one or two others slip out.”

“There’s an air force base in New Jersey,” Steve says. “McGuire. We can get out from under Thanos via the subway tunnels, and as soon as we’re out of the way, hotwire a car and drive there.”

“And what, jack a plane? Seriously?” Clint asks.

“If Rocket’s ship can’t fly-”

“It might, in a few days,” Nebula says. “But by then Thanos surely would have found us.”

“We could ask nicely first,” Steve says. “Though we should probably be prepared for them to refuse. Or try to take us into custody themselves.”

“We will have no idea what the government thinks of us, in light of all this,” Natasha says. “They could be desperate enough to trust us, since we’re their only chance, or Ross’s campaigns against us could have worked.”

“They might see us as responsible for all this,” Thor says. “But unfortunate as it is, then yet, we will have to steal a plane.”

“They should have at least one stealth jet in a hangar,” Carol says. “Might be an older model but if you’re moving fast…”

“Then we fly up to retrieve the axe,” Natasha is nodding along. “Yes. We can use that to get to Wakanda, right?”

“Stormbreaker won’t be subtle,” Thor says. “Thanos will know that we’ve used it. Though I admit, I don’t want to leave it in the wild like that. And it will be the fastest.”

“I agree,” Steve says. “We can’t just leave it there. It’s one of the only things that’s come close to touching the gauntlet. We’re going to need it.” Thor nods.

“We can play it by ear,” Natasha says. “Retrieve the axe, but we’ll see how things go. If we think speed is better than stealth, we use the axe. If stealth is better than speed, we keep the plane. There might be a quinjet that survived.”

“We’ll need to contact Shuri,” Steve says. “On a secure channel, if possible.”

“Rocket was tinkering with some of our stuff earlier,” Carol says. “Maybe he can.”

“I will go ask him,” Nebula says and leaves the room. Thor watches her go with a frown. She has been even quieter since Thanos came to Earth and he feels for her.

“Good,” Steve says. “How’s your shoulder?”

Thor lets Steve check the wound - still jagged and painful, but quickly healing. It is no longer bleeding, though the underlying tissues are still working to stitch themselves together. Thor wonders if it will scar. He does not have man - only the rarest of wounds leave scars on Asgardians. The most prominent is, of course, the scar over his eye given to him by Hela’s blade. He wonders if the Gauntlet is powerful enough to leave a mark of its wounds on him. It seems sensible that it would. But Thor wonders if he’ll be alive long enough to find out.

Rocket brings back some supplies from the downed ship, and, grumbling about it the whole time, manages to cobble together a communication device. Natasha helps him patch into a secure SHIELD channel and dial to Wakanda.

“We won’t be able to talk for long without detection,” Natasha says. “So let’s keep it brief.”

“We feared the worst,” Shuri’s crackling voice comes through. “They will be happy to hear you are alive.”

They explain their plan, and Thor’s belief that they’re missing something at the source, and she agrees after a moment’s hesitation.

“Drs. Banner and Foster haven’t been having any more luck. They can only so far trace the signal of the Stones. They say it could possibly take years to break down the composition, to find a way to destroy them, or even harness their energy.” She sighs audibly. “If you believe there is another way…”

“Short of us being able to use the Gauntlet ourselves,” Steve shakes his head. “We’ve been throwing all we’ve got at Thanos and got nothing. Thor thinks he’s onto something, we have to explore it.” Their eyes meet over the microphone and Thor nods.

“Well,” Shuri says after a moment. “It’s more than we have.” She gives them a code to pass to the border guard and they cut the connection.

They plan to leave at dusk. Thor, Steve, and Natasha will go south, to make their way to Wakanda. Carol will lead the rest to divert Thanos.

“Can you get us any flight on that ship?”

Rocket shakes his head. “I can do my best, but we’re really running on fumes here. Our power cells are falling, I can’t use any of the regenerating equipment…shit’s falling apart. But…yeah, I’ll do my best.”

“This might be a terrible plan,” Clint says when the planning’s done. “We’re all going to die.”

“It might be a terrible plan, but it’s the only one we’ve got,” Steve says. He looks exhausted. They all look exhausted. It’s not just the ship that’s fall apart. It’s not just the ship that’s running on fumes.

Hope is running out. They all begin to understand that they are going to lose. There is no way that any of this will work. They have nothing, no leads, no firepower. They are going to lose, and they are going to die, and soon. But somehow they keep powering through.

“I am not going to die, while Thanos still lives,” Nebula growls. “I will not die without killing him first.” She looks around at all of them.

“You know what?” Rocket says. “Going out fighting Thanos…doesn’t seem so bad, does it? It was good enough for the rest of them, wasn’t it?” Quill, Drax, Mantis…Groot. If it was good enough for them, right…?”

Natasha’s eyes meet Thor’s for a second, then she looks away. Undoubtedly, she’s thinking about his early declarations that those who had vanished were not dead. If Thor is honest with himself, he doesn’t know what to think anymore. He still believes there is something _more,_ something they don’t yet understand, but increasingly he questions himself. The sharper his grief feels, the more he thinks that his beliefs were all a product of his denial. His mind protecting him from the truth. That after everything, his brother is dead.

Thor drops his head down.

“Let’s not go down without a fight though, kay?” Carol says.

There is a silent agreement, but it's halfhearted. They are all losing energy.

The rain has stopped but the sky is still grey as they leave their hideout. Thor feels strangely peaceful parting with the others to set out with just Steve and Natasha. Perhaps because they had been together since this whole thing had started, since he’d been rescued from the Raft. They had seen him at the worst and would not have any expectations of his performance.

The streets are mostly deserted as they move south.

“We can get in over here,” Steve says. “According to the maps we managed to find.” In the distance, there is the sound of an explosion. They all glance north. “I guess this is our time to move.”

“They’ll be okay,” Natasha says with a frown. “I told Clint not to make it a suicide mission. Carol had a good plan, and she at least seemed like she wanted to survive. They will, if she manages to get Nebula to retreat.”

“Nebula will see reason. She has wanted to kill Thanos for a long time now, she won’t give up so easily,” Thor says. “But if this fails, I expect we will not having many more chances. If we keep failing…I do not expect to last much longer.”

Steve looks at him and for a second Thor thinks he’s going to disagree. But then he nods, and says, “I know. I can only hope that we can inspire others maybe, that someone else, someone young like Shuri, can eventually make this right. Or at least build something out of this mess.”

Steve is thinking of a revolution. Thor is not so hopeful. “I doubt by the time he is finished, that there will be any morale left for resistance.”

“Hey,” Natasha says. “We don’t have time for pessimism right now. That’s how good soldiers get killed. And we’ve survived this far. We’ve pissed him off.”

“I cannot help but think that it was due to luck, and that luck must run out sometime.” He thought it had, when his vision slowly faded after the blow to the compound. He feels like he is running out of favor with the universe. He has simply survived too much and it all must end sometime.

“You’re not giving us enough credit. We survived this far because we worked together and we gave everything we got. We might not make it, true, but we can’t act like we’re already dead.”

But Thor feels like he is already dead. That a piece of his heart or spirit is atrophying. It was all so much loss, in so short a time, and the dead have taken chunks out of him. And then each failure has taken more. Eventually it will take the rest, and he will fall into the abyss.

A second explosion sounds from the north.

“That’s our signal.” Steve clears his throat. “Let’s go.”

There is a room deep in the labyrinth of tunnels winding beneath the streets of New York. It is a control room. It is always staffed. Except, right now, instead of two workers to monitor and maintain the pumps that keep water from flooding into the tunnels, there are two piles of ash on the concrete floor. In the wake of all the chaos, their supervisor also among the missing, no one has thought about that room in days. They have been consumed with putting out fires, with trying to find enough medical personnel to treat the wounded, and that room and its engineers have slipped through the cracks. One has a wife. But she got only the busy signal when she desperately called the city to try and find her husband, his phone went straight to voicemail, and eventually her phone died and with no power she hasn’t been able to charge it.

It’s been raining for a long time. A wet week. The pumps are overloaded and no one has noticed. Soon they will fail, and river water will rush into the empty and unmanned tunnels with no one the wiser.

There are sounds of battle from the north, but the three of them put the thoughts of it from their minds and make their way into the subway down a set of stairs.

“Feel bad about skipping the fare, Cap?” Natasha says with a wry smile as they hop over the gate.

“You think this is the first time I’ve jumped the turnstile? Jesus, I don’t think I’ve _ever_ actually paid for a subway right before, Romanov.”

“You pay for rides on this thing?” Thor says as he looks around at the crumbling subways station. Water leaks in through the roof. “I was a prince. On another planet. With access to the bifrost that had the power to take us wherever we wanted, I did not exactly take…’public transit’ as you call it.”

Natasha laughs. “We get the picture, your highness.”

“We should be able to follow this pretty far.” Steve shines a light down the tunnel. “Looks like all the power’s out, so it will be dark, but no third rail to worry about. This way.”

They move through the darkness for fifteen minutes or so before Natasha breaks the silence. “How do you think the battle’s going?”

“The first phase should be over by now,” Steve says. “If they stuck to the plan.”

Thor’s next footfall lands in a puddle. He hesitates a moment but they all press on. A few minutes later, the water’s up to their ankles.

“What the fuck?” Natasha says. “Is this from the rain?”

“Probably, shit.” Steve tries to look further ahead. “I didn’t think of that. The rain, the sewers. If it’s the river…”

“We’re in trouble,” Natasha says.

“We should bail out at the next station,” Steve says.

“And quick, it’s possible that the pumps failed.” At Thor’s confused look, she elaborates, “There are pumps that keep these tunnels clear of water. And with the power out for days and-”

“The city employees reduced to ash…” Steve directs his flashlight down. The water is definitely moving, and fast. It’s quickly up to their knees. In the silence, there comes the clear sound of water rushing in.

“Go! We need to make it to the next station before we’re completely underwater.” They move quickly through the water though it gets harder with every step.

They don’t move fast enough. The comes a roaring sound that gets closer and closer that makes Thor think, absurdly, of the waterfall on Asgard. Steve pushes Natasha ahead of him and they try to run, dim light not far ahead-

The water hits them hard, flooding in from an intersecting tunnel. Thor manages to suck in a last deep breath of air before he slips underwater. He tries to grab Steve and Natasha, managing to catch a bit of Steve’s jacket. Steve in turn manages to grab onto a pillar to keep them from being washed away and Natasha grabs onto Steve’s ankle.

There’s a grate, a little ahead, where daylight is visible. The station is too far off, but if he can make it there, he might be able to wrench it free and they can escape. Lungs burning he lets go of Steve and swims to the roof of the tunnel. He tugs once and it doesn’t budge. Repositions himself and tries again. Steve appears at his side to help tug at the grate. Panic sets in as even their combined strength isn’t enough to budge the grate.

Until, suddenly, it gives way. Not just the grate, but the concrete around it too. It’s been weakened by the rain, by the tunnel periodically flooding ever since the generators failed, and then Thor and Steve’s combined force dealt the death blow. The tunnel caves in, opening up a sinkhole with a rushing river beneath.

They just barely manage to make it onto solid ground, dragging themselves onto the crumbling pavement. Stunned, sopping wet, they catch their breaths, spitting water onto the ground.

Thor manages to stagger to his feet. “What now?” he gasps. His shoulder is throbbing.

“Someone will have noticed that,” Natasha says hoarsely. “Half the street caving in.”

“We can still make it,” Steve says. “If we find a car, we can hotwire it, we’ll drive the rest of the way.”

“But the bridges-”

There is an alien shriek. A Chitauri, looking just as shocked at their appearance, takes aim. Thor takes him out, but another takes his place. A second and third take his place, Thor kills them too. A couple more are just rounding the corner.

Natasha has produced a gun. “We have to take them out fast, before Thanos-” One shrieks, lunges, and she shoots it in the head.

Chitauri before them, a river behind. They’re trapped, and they’re running out of time and energy for a battle. If they are overwhelmed by the creatures now, all their plans are ruined-

There comes the roar of a propulsion and the familiar sound of charging canons. The remaining Chitauri are quickly eliminated one after the other.

Tony lands amidst the corpses. He flips up his visor. “Hey guys,” he says, a note of guilt in his voice. “Did you miss me?”

Steve can’t help but laugh.

“Rhodes is up north, with as much as a defense as we could get organized,” Tony says as they wait for the jet autopiloting its way towards them. “I hear we’re heading to Wakanda.”

“How’d you know?”

“He connected with the other Captain - the new one, Danvers. She let us know you’d be somewhere down here. Rest was luck, I guess. I saw the Chitauri, saw the sinkhole…thought you guys might be at the center of it.” The jet comes around the corner and lowers into the avenue. With the sinkhole it doesn’t have enough room to land, but that doesn’t matter. It hovers, and Tony hits a few buttons to lower a platform. “Look, guys…I’m sorry. I know it’s not going to make things right…”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “and I do too. But, let’s talk about this after. After Thanos is gone…there will be time.”

Tony relaxes a bit. “Yeah. After.”

Aboard the jet, things are still a bit awkward. Steve and Nat take up the controls, given their experience with flying into Wakanda. In the back, Tony won’t quite look at Thor, so he finally breaks the silence. “I’m not going to kill you, Stark,” he says finally. “I know what I said before. I was very angry, I was-”

“Naw, I had it coming. Really. I know I’m sorry’s not going to cut it. But I hope I get the chance to make it right.”

“What made you come back?”

“I was real pissed off, too. About a lot of things. And I just wanted to be done. I just wanted out. You guys were right, I was being a selfish asshole, thinking I could damn everyone else just to hold onto what I had.” He takes a shaky breath. “And Rhodes kind of kicked my ass into shape. Pointed out that I was being a bit unreasonable.” Thor snorts. “Yeah, okay, a lot unreasonable.” There’s a pause. “I know this isn’t going to fix anything.”

Thor thinks about his last flight to Wakanda. He feels a twinge in his chest that is probably nothing more than the lingering effects of the gauntlet’s strike to his shoulder, but it reminds him vividly of the strange pain he felt when Loki used his magic in Lithuania, and the twinges he would feel when they separated.

“No,” he says. “It won’t. Just because you’ve come back now, doesn’t erase the rest. Doesn’t erase the Raft.”

Tony grimaces and looks away. “No. It doesn’t.”

“I tried to warn you, both Loki and I did. And you didn’t trust us, you betrayed us. I don’t know how to move past that. I am going to try, now, because you are here now and willing to help. But…if we are able to fix this, I do not know what world waits for us in the aftermath. I still feel as though I cannot trust Earth, cannot protect my brother or my people here, even if we are able to bring them back-” Thor cuts off, his eyes stinging.

“I don’t know what’s going to be left afterwards either,” Tony says. “But yeah. We’ve got a lot to work on. If you’re willing to try…”

Thor feels weary. “Let’s focus on defeating Thanos now.”

“You’re sure about this whole…dream vision thing?”

“Honestly, no. But it is all we have. There must be something I missed.” In truth, though his conscious mind still doubts, Thor’s heart feels more sure. Perhaps it is nothing more than a fool’s hope, but he thinks he might actually be right about this one.

They take a wide angle on the city, jutting out over the farmlands to the west and then sharply angling back towards the remains of the compound.

“Doesn’t look _that_ bad,” Natasha remarks, looking at the smoldering buildings. “Like, we might be able to rebuild. New coat of paint.” Steve shoots her a disbelieving look.

They don’t land, don’t even come that close to the ground. They just open the doors and Thor holds out his hand. For a tense moment, he doesn’t think Stormbreaker will come to him and then it does, hurtling out of the trees and fitting perfectly into his palm. The impact rocks the jet a little bit, but Thor is careful to contain the sparks.

“Impressive,” Tony says. “ _Way_ more impressive than that hammer.”

Thor smiles in return, feeling the power course through him. Natasha quickly closes the jet and they take off at the maximum speed, turning east towards the ocean.

The rest of the journey is fairly quiet. Thor takes the opportunity to rest, to continue healing the gash in his shoulder. They come up on Wakanda relatively quickly, the quinjet covering the distance faster than any other.

Steve sends out a coded signal and gets an affirmative response.

“You are cleared for entry,” a voice says through the comms.

“Let’s hope so,” Tony says. “Because it sure does look like we’re about to hit the-” The jet passes through the barrier, the image of a mountain vanishes and is replaced by flat farmlands, forests, and the lights of the city in the distance.

“Should we land in the capitol?” Steve asks.

Thor shakes his head. “No. I want to go straight there, to the trees. We can continue on to the others once we investigate there. Once we know better if there is something we have missed.”

They pilot towards the place where the universe ended and land in the field. The ground is still scorched from the battle, the grass bloodstained. Though the bodies have been removed, there are still some piles of ashes, drifting in the breeze.

“Watch your step.” Natasha picks her way around the piles. The four of them head into the trees, following the signs of battle back to the exact spot Thanos won. Nothing has changed in the small clearing. The ground is churned up, gouges taken out of the trees. There is a black circle in the dirt, Thor presumes the exact place he did it. Though there are also spindling tendrils branching out from the circle like the aftereffects of lightning strike so maybe it was equally caused by Thor striking him with Stormbreaker.

Of course, there are piles of ash here as well. Thor tries not to look at them. He feels dizzy at the thought of what they are. He doesn’t remember which of the piles of ash are which.

It is silent in the trees. There is no breeze here, not even the sound of animals. It feels dead. A place that holds no life, barely even air. To disturb it feels like a violation of something sacred. None of them speak in voices louder than a whisper.

“So this is where it happened?” Tony asks, looking at the black circle, at the damage around them.

“This is where it happened,” Natasha confirms.

There are still remnants of Thanos’s blood on the Earth, on the barks of the trees. Thor rests Stormbreaker against a tree, on top of a patch of Thanos’s blood and turns around.

“So, what are we looking for?” Steve asks. All of their eyes are on him.

Thor’s not sure yet. He had followed a dream here, a last fragile string of hope, and he can’t bear to give it up. But he has no idea what he is looking for in this clearing, what they could have missed the first time.

He’s about to open his mouth to confess that he has no idea what they’re looking for, that they should perhaps give up and head to the capitol to consult with the others - when he sees something move out of the corner of his eye. It’s just a flicker at first, gone when he turns to look at it, but then it appears again, clearer this time but still in shadow.

“Sam?” The figure’s shape has become more defined, into the form of Sam Wilson, talking to T’Challa in the center of the clearing.

“What?” Steve follows his gaze but his eyes slide past Sam’s form. “You see Sam?”

“You cannot see them?” Because there are more. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see the shadows of people moving around the clearing. People who had been turned to dust before his eyes. Wanda, sitting on a fallen log and biting her nails. Bucky, leaning against a tree and scanning the horizon like he’s keeping watch. Stephen Strange sitting in the middle of the clearing and frowning, lost in thought. “You truly cannot see them?” Thor says.

“Who?”

“The other half…like ghosts.” Thor turns in a circle, hungry, desperate, but there is no sign of Loki, nor the Valkyrie. _Where are they?_ Instead, there are quite a few people he has never see before. That’s when it hits him: there is no way this is a hallucination. If it were a hallucination, why would he see all these strangers, and not his brother?

“Ghosts? Thor, come on, fill us in,” Tony says.

“Yeah, what’s going on?”

Thor turns to answer them and stops dead. In the very center of where Thanos snapped his fingers, that black circle, stands a towering ash tree. It is old and gnarled, devoid of leaves while the others still have all of their summer growth.

“What is this?” Thor steps forward. The branches of the trees waver in the breeze, though there is no wind.

“Thor, what are you-” Natasha starts to follow his gaze and cuts off. “Oh. Oh shit. Where the hell did that tree come from?”

“Yeah, that was definitely not there a second ago,” Steve says.

“Magic tree. Great. It’s a magic tree.”

Thor ignores them, transfixed by the tree. It’s like he is drawn towards it by some invisible force. He can hear something else now too: a drumbeat, faint like it’s coming from far away. Then a roll of thunder in the distance.

“Thor?!”

_Go on,_ three voices say in his head. _Take it._

He reaches out a hand and feels a spark of magic, drawn from deep within his chest.

The guards inform Shuri as soon as their plane crosses the barrier. She pulls up surveillance footage and watches them angle away from the city. “They’re not coming here first…” she says quietly.

“I guess they want to go straight there, come up here if they find anything,” Jane answers.

“Do you think they’ll find anything?” Bruce asks.

Jane sighs. “I don’t know. Our energy readings have been off the charts there, but stable since it all happened. I don’t know what they could possibly be looking for.”

“I don’t know either, but if Thor says he’s got a hunch, maybe we should listen.”

“The magic thing again?” She half smiles back at him.

“Yeah, the magic thing. Like, he never really seemed to be the best at telling the future, Loki used to make fun of him for it, but he was really starting to get better it seemed. He had more control. I think if Thor thinks he’s going to find something…we don’t have to doubt him.”

“Or it could be grief still,” Jane says. “He likes to push feelings away, use purpose to distract from how much it hurts. If this doesn’t work out…”

“Let’s just let him try.”

“And when he crashes?”

The two of them continue their conversation. Shuri doesn’t take her eyes off the screen, only half listening to them. She watches them land, watches them disembark and move into the trees. She’s glad she thought to send out a camera earlier, she has a crystal clear view of the clearing. They poke around a bit, talking. She doesn’t turn on the audio.

Shuri has never been one to believe in magic. She’s found in the last few days that she has that in common with Jane Foster. She wants to believe that what she’s seeing has some rational, _scientific_ explanation to it. She knows there are forces at work in the universe that she does not yet have the words to explain - but she’s always sort of believed if she really put her mind to it, she’d be able to figure it all out. What they’re talking about - seers and visions of the future, and spells - never really been her thing.

On the screen, she sees Thor turn, like he’s following something in his vision that the cameras don’t pick up. The image suddenly distorts, fuzzing for a second, even though the camera is brand new, all technology state of the art. In one frame it looks like there’s a massive tree growing out of the ground, but in the next it’s gone. The picture keeps distorting, taking on a strange purple hue…and then she sees the clear outlines of bodies, standing and walking around the clearing. They’re just edges, faint blurs, but they’re clearly there.

She leans forward in her seat. “What on Earth?”

She watches as Thor starts towards where the tree had appeared moments before. Lightning flashes, even though the day had been perfectly clear a second before. He reaches his hand out and thunder so loud it shakes the lab cries out in answer.

On the other side of the barrier, entangled in the threads of the loom, Loki gasps for breath, drenched in sweat. His free hand is clutching his chest as he struggles for air. _They did warn that it would hurt,_ he thinks bitterly to himself as the magic pulls on him, like it’s tearing him apart from the inside. Unravelling something deep within.

He blinks and his vision wavers. “I see it,” he manages to gasp. “I see it…a tree…blue sky…”

“Okay,” Valkyrie says. “Okay, that’s a good thing, right?” The Norns don’t answer her. Loki cries out in pain again and she takes a step forward, stopped by Peter’s hand on her arm. Gamora watches silently from the shadows.

Loki blinks again and sees the loom towering above him. Again and it is blue sky. Again and again his vision changes, flips until he is no longer certain which way is up. His head spins, his muscles start to go limp, losing the battle with exhaustion. Just when he thinks he is going to lose his grip on the spell, his magic connects to a power source and energy floods into him. It tastes like the power of a storm. His next blink he sees a hand in the darkness. He understands nothing but the hand. Letting go of his aching chest he reaches out towards the hand. They barely brush fingertips when the magic floods into him even stronger, power searing along every nerve. It feels as dangerous and out of control as that night when they escaped Lithuania, but a thousand times stronger, a thousand times more consuming. He thinks he might scream but is long beyond hearing anything, even the sound of his own voice.

Time and reality spin around him. It all is unraveling.

“ _Now!”_ The Norns cry. “ _Take it!”_

He gets a better grip on the hand reaching out of the darkness. And holds tight to it like an anchor.

In the clearing, Wanda suddenly gets to her feet.

“What? What is it?” Peter Parker asks.

“I think something is happening,” Mantis replies. “I can feel…”

Strange stands up. “It’s time. Get ready.”

“Get ready for what?” Sam cries.

Strange doesn’t answer him, but beckons everyone closer to the center of the trees as a storm picks up, the violet sky turning a dark, almost black, purple.

There is magic in the air, even Thor, who is no sorcerer, can sense it. The wind picks up, the sky darkens into a storm.

“What’s going on?” Natasha cries.

Thor doesn’t answer. Because he feels the brush of a cold finger brush against his palm and then is overwhelmed with a rush of magic, flowing both through him and out of him. It hurts, it feels vast and out of his control. Thor can do nothing else but try to hold on as the power threatens to consume him. Lightning flashes, dances across the sky. He can hear the others crying out for him but cannot answer.

A cool hand wraps around his, holds tight, and all reality blinks out.

Carol spits out a mouthful of blood. “That's the best you got, asshole?”

Thanos grins, raising the gauntlet. She gets her hands up just in time to block the stream with her own power, yellow light meeting violet as fighter jets square off with Thanos’s Chitauri fleet around her.

Below, Nebula takes on Ebony Maw alone, dueling him viciously. Rocket has a massive gun and is cackling as he takes down Chitauri after Chitauri.

But Carol is slipping. Already worn out from the previous battles, alone against Thanos’s singular might. She’s starting to lose the fight. She grits her teeth and pushes harder. An arrow flies out from behind her and strikes Thanos in the chest, buying her a few more seconds, but all it is is a few more seconds. The gauntlet’s light threatens to overtake hers and then there’s a sound like thunder, or a drum, so loud that it hurts her ears and knocks the breath from her lungs-

There’s a wind inside the cavern, swirling around them faster and faster.

“Okay, this is starting to really freak me out!” Peter cries. Thunder booms around them.

“Wait…” Valkyrie looks up at the loom. “That’s not a loom…it’s a tree.”

“What? A tree?”

“Look closer,” Gamora says.

Peter looks to her, then back to Loki and the Norns. They’re right. The loom is a tree, with gnarled branches towering high above them. “Oh,” is all he can find to say.

“Daylight…” Valkyrie says. “I see daylight…”

“Go,” the Norns say. “Do not disappoint us.”

There’s a bright flash of blinding light, and then the world goes pitch black. There is an answering boom of thunder in the darkness and then nothing.

The next thing Valkyrie knows, she is flat on her back in a patch of grass, the blades of it tickling at her skin, with the wind knocked out of her.

The magic releases him, leaving behind exhaustion, a feeling like he’s been wrung dry. The drumbeat pulses in his ear fades and he realizes he’s flat on his back, breathing fresh, clean air.

Loki opens his eyes to a clear blue sky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Holy shit, guys, so we're getting to the final act. I kind of can't believe I only have two more major chapters to post. Whoa. 
> 
> Would like to take this opportunity to just give a quick PSA - last Sunday night my laptop screen broke. Just like. Went dark. It seems like the computer itself is okay, but like...I need to be able to see what I'm doing to actually use it. So, broken laptop. But! I had a full harddrive backup and an older Chromebook to use, thus no risk of losing my work and no delay in posting! So! Back up your work! And hang onto older electronics as a backup (if they're still usable of course)! (I almost got rid of this Chromebook when I was moving to grad school, and my dad stopped me, so shout out to my dad. This is the second time this little thing has saved my butt when my main laptop failed.)
> 
> Next Week: a second chance. 
> 
> As always, Comments/Kudos/Shares/Frogs always appreciated! <3 Happy Friday!


	9. Heavy in Your Arms

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Norns have given them a new opportunity. There are joyous reunions, but the happiness may be short lived. 
> 
> Thor will stop at nothing to destroy Thanos this time.

_“Strange as it may seem, I still hope for the best, even though the best, like an interesting piece of mail, so rarely arrives, and even when it does it can be lost so easily.”_

_\- Lemony Snicket, The Beatrice Letters_

“I’m going to be digging Cheetos out of the seats for weeks.”

“No, you won’t, Mom, we were eating Doritos, not Cheetos!”

“Well, I guess that’s better then! At least it won’t be orange.” She turns around to tickle her girls as they shriek with laughter. “Do you want to go to that garden party next week?”

“What, at the Clark’s? Oh man, of course, they always throw the best parties. Oh, sh-” He slams on the breaks, but the car that swerved into their lane corrects and barely misses them. He leans on the horn. “Jesus Christ, learn to drive!”

“We can ask Lizzie to babysit. You girls want to see Lizzie, right?”

“Yeah!” They cry in joyous unison.

“Hey, good for you, Diane, you deserve it - whoa, we’ve got a little extra bleeding going on there.” The patient’s vitals drop for a moment, then recover.

“Vitals holding steady, everything looks normal.”

“Got it. Yeah, Diane, what are you two going to get up to tonight?”

“There’s this new movie playing that I’ve been just _dying_ to see…”

“That was just the landing gear coming up.”

He smiles wanly. “Right.”

The plane continues gaining altitude. Shannon opens her book back up.

The flight attendant comes by. “Anything to drink?”

“Ginger ale, please.”

Shannon sets aside her book. “Gin and tonic.” Her seat neighbor turns to look at her. “That’s it. That’s the trick to easy flying.”

He smiles, wincing as the plane hits a patch of turbulence, and turns back to the flight attendant. “I think I’ll have a gin and tonic, then.”

“Okay, got the stuff for our new ghost friend! Let’s get me out of here!”

“Roger that, Scott, bringing you back up.”

The wormhole drags Scott from the quantum realm into the sunny San Francisco afternoon.

He blinks. “Hey, did you guys feel that?”

“Feel what?”

“I don’t know, it was like…deja vu or something. Felt weird.” Scott shakes off the feeling. “Anywho, let’s head back to the lab.”

“You’re gonna help us pack up first, right?”

“Uh, _obviously_ , Hope.”

A couple walks hand in hand down the promenade, smiling, in love. A group of five young men lean against the railing, laughing as one tells a story of his drunken escapades.

There is a squeal of brakes, the sound of a honking horn.

The world spins on. There is a blip. It is not a seamless transition. Not quite as though the ones that were gone had never vanished at all - but that they were returned, a moment after they had disappeared, left with a disquieting sense that something was _off._ That something had happened that they had forgotten. A sort of deja vu, a memory just out of reach.

Some things that had been put in motion could not be stopped. Cars veering off course, helicopters losing control. Most disasters are averted. Some are not, but the damage is nowhere near what it had been. Freak accidents are all those are thought to be.

Everyone else shakes off the odd feeling, continuing their days. Everything skips, like an old, scratched CD. There’s worried gossip about the presence of aliens in New York, but at least they’ve gone now, and whatever that was, surely the Avengers could handle it…

Thanos blinks and his vision changes. One moment he has the Gauntlet outstretched, ready to crush his enemy, to show all the universe what it meant to oppose him - the next, he is back on his ship. Outside the window is the cold Void of space. He still has the Gauntlet outstretched towards empty air.

“What? What is this?” Thanos moves his hand and pain shoots up his arm. The Gauntlet vibrates, a power reverberating around it. “What is this?”

“Magic,” Ebony Maw snarls. “Powerful magic. Banished us from Earth.”

“What sorcerer could be so powerful?” Thanos says. “I didn’t know anyone with this level of skill had survived. We will have to root them out.” He closes his fist, feeling a pulse of concern at the state of the Gauntlet. It is still whole, the Stones sparkling in the settings, as damaged and flaking as it had been after his use of it to cleanse the universe. But whenever he reaches for its power, there’s a jolt of pain. It’s magic feels clouded somehow, dulled.

“Figure out where we are.” He barks the order to cover for his uncertainty. “Bring us back to Earth. There will be no negotiations this time. No waiting for them to come to their senses and turn over our enemies. We bring our whole army down on their heads.”

“Of course, master,” the Maw bows and floats off towards the bridge.

Thanos takes to his throne. He flexes his hand. The power still feels blocked, stopped up, but the pain is less this time. Whatever spell the surviving sorcerer - who he vows to find and give a long, tortuous death - won’t hold forever. Not against such power as the Infinity Stones. The spell will falter and he will be right back where he was. The most powerful being in the galaxy, a god that no one will ever challenge again. He will crush Earth’s last defenses, the pathetic remnants of the Avengers, he will regain control and before long he will be worshipped, like he has long deserved.

He is inevitable.

In a field in Wakanda, an army gets to its feet. The soldiers are all bewildered, suddenly missing their enemy. All of the alien forces have vanished.

“What?” M’Baku turns in a circle. “How did I get back to the field? What is going on?”

“What do you mean back to the field?” A Dora Milaje shouts back. “Where did they go?”

“You do not remember what happened?” M’Baku looks around him, suddenly recognizing people that days ago, he had watched turn to dust before his eyes. The soldiers all shout over each other, and it becomes clear that half remember the events of the past week, and half have no memory of anything. But they are suddenly, mysteriously, returned from wherever they had gone when Thanos snapped them out of existence.

Back in the trees, at the center of the would-be apocalypse, the Avengers slowly get their bearings and begin to rise. Carol is the first to her feet, bouncing up and spinning around in a circle. She blows the hair out of her face.

“Holy shit,” she says. “I think it worked.”

“Buck?”

“Hey, old man.”

Steve rushes to embrace him, knees weak with relief.

Sam stumbles from the bushes, Rhodes close behind. “We did it?” Sam says. “We made it back?” Steve reaches out an arm and pulls Sam into their embrace.

“Whatever you all did worked,” Rhodes says incredulously. “It _worked._ ”

“Oh, hey, Mr. Stark, we’re back-” Tony grabs onto Peter and squeezes so tight the air is forced out of his lungs in a wheeze. “Oh, okay, yeah, I’m fine now.”

Okoye helps T’Challa to his feet. He doesn’t dissolve in her hand this time. “What happened? How is this all happening?” Her eyes are wide, shocked. “It has been over a week since-”

“A week?” T’Challa frowns. “We’ve been gone a week?”

“Quill, you _asshole!_ ” Rocket collides with Peter’s knees. “Groot! Mantis, aw, even you Drax, I’ve never been happier to see you jackasses.” Peter grins and just watches as his crew embraces. He’s still reeling from what he saw in that cavern, and he can’t help but feel like something is missing. Gone.

Peter Quill had chased a shadow all over that odd underworld and for _nothing_. It was okay, he had to be okay with that. He watches a dozen reunions, a dozen joys and thinks he could maybe be okay with that. Fuck the _Milano_ , he would get a new ship and name it _Ga_ -

“Peter?” He freezes, not daring to turn. “Peter, where are we? What happened? Last thing I remember is-”

He turns, assuming that he won’t see anything but the trees. It’s only a ghost again, one that will vanish when he gets too close. Instead, Gamora stands, just as he last saw her on Knowhere. She is blinking in the sun with her hand on her head like it hurts her. “Peter?” He rushes forward to embrace her and she doesn’t even disappear. Instead she is solid, and warm and awkwardly patting his back as he starts to cry.

“Gamora…” Peter sobs. “Jesus. _Fuck._ ”

“Peter, are you alright??”

Another form collides with them. From the whizzing motor, Peter can tell it’s Nebula, wrapping her thin arms around them both.

“Holy shit, is Nebula hugging Quill? That’s a sight I never thought I’d see.”

“She is indeed. They appear very emotionally overwrought. I do not even need to touch them to be sure.”

“Perhaps we should give them a minute,” Drax says.

But Groot makes the first move, settling contentedly against Gamora’s back and wrapping his branches around them. In another moment, the rest of the Guardians join the embrace.

Clint’s phone is vibrating. He scrambles to grab it from his pocket.

“Laura?”

“Uh, babe? Where’d you go?” Laura’s voice coming from the phone is confused but amused. “Thought you were just going to go grab the mustard?”

“Something…something came up,” he says through the tears. He wraps an arm around Natasha’s shoulders. “I’ll explain later. Sorry. Tell the kids I’m sorry.”

“Sure, are you okay though?”

“Yeah, yeah, and you guys are okay?” He’s still weeping, making him seem very much not okay, even as he continually tries to assure Laura that he is.

Wanda kneels by the log where she had killed Vision. He is gone, not a trace of his body remains, not even a mark on the ground where he died. The log is covered with a green moss. She touches it, feeling the reality of the soft plant on her fingers. It is strange, after the muted feelings of the Soul Realm.

“Are you all right?” Strange asks.

She laughs without humor. “Probably not.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he says. “But he wasn’t going to come back.”

“I know,” Wanda says. She feels the hole of grief in her chest open back up. “I had been foolish to hope.”

Thor is almost afraid to close the gap between them. His hand shakes as he reaches out to where Loki is gingerly getting to his feet. Just a brush against his shoulder, and his hand doesn’t pass through. Loki doesn’t vanish, just look up with wide, shocked eyes. He feels solid and warm and trembling when Thor grasps his arms harder, when he touches his cheek.

“Loki,” he gasps. “How-”

Loki shakes his head. “We’re back? We’re really back? We did it?” Tears well in his eyes. “Ah…I…the Norns…”

“It’s okay,” Thor says. “It’s okay, you’re here-”

“Thor-”

Thor sweeps him into his arms and they collapse to their knees. The dam holding back his tears breaks and he sobs with relief. Loki buries his face in his neck, clinging on to his clothes with tight fists. Loki cries quietly, shaking like a leaf in his arms. Thor adjusts his grip, holding a bit tighter. He strokes back Loki’s hair in an effort to be soothing, but he’s sure it falls sort for the way he cannot control his own sobs.

He hadn’t quite realized how empty he had felt, the whole time Loki had been gone. He knew that he was in pain but he only realized how vast the abyss was this time until Loki - and all the others - were returned to him. Now that he holds his brother in his arms again, he can truly appreciate the depth of grief he had sunk to, this third time he thought him lost.

Thor presses his lips to the side of Loki’s head, then presses their temples together. He still has no idea how they have returned, what magic has brought them back, or where Thanos is now, but for the moment he doesn’t particularly care.

Valkyrie gets to her feet, looking around her, searching. The last thing she saw before it all went back was Loki bent over, tangled in thread, and screaming in pain. She searches the small crowd, relaxing only when she finally sees him, tucked into Thor’s arms.

“You actually did it,” she says quietly. “Huh. They actually fucking did it.” To her right, Peter Quill’s sandy hair is barely visible in a pile of bodies. She smiles.

Someone knocks into her. It takes a second before the fight response eases up and she realizes the body that collided with her is none other than Bruce Banner.

“Oh my _God,_ Val, what the _fuck_ just happened?”

“It’s a long story,” she gasps out around his crushing grip.

He releases her and starts talking, more excited than she’s ever seen him. “Like, one second I was in the lab with Jane and the next thing I knew I was back by the waterfall, where I was after the battle finished. It was like the Hulk took over, but I can’t remember any of it, not even what triggered it…”

“It’s…complicated,” she says. “And I couldn’t begin to really explain it, but…I think we travelled in time.”

His eyebrows shoot up. “In time? What?” A moment later he shakes his head. “You know what, yeah, that actually makes sense.”

The Valkyrie grins.

Shuri comes barreling down the hill, followed a bit behind by Jane. M’Baku trails after them, looking utterly bewildered. T’Challa barely has time to prepare himself before he has to catch her in his arms.

She is chattering, half in English and half in Xhosa. “-I can’t believe it, I have no idea what’s happening, I thought they were _crazy,_ but it is really like magic, I swear, I’m never touching magic again after this-” T’Challa makes out through her rapid speech. “-I’m so glad you’re back, I hated being queen, it was the worst, the absolute worst-” He pats her back gently, laughing despite himself.

“The question is _how_ you’re back,” Okoye says. “How is this even possible?”

“And where is Thanos?”

“Thanos isn’t here,” Jane says. “I scanned Earth’s atmosphere, we currently have no anomalies.”

“We were fighting him, though,” Carol says. “In New York. So he just vanished? Can someone tell me what’s going on? What happened when you guys got here?”

“I’d honestly like an explanation on that, too,” Natasha says. “Because I’m still…pretty lost.”

Thor shakes his head, equally bewildered. He glances down at Loki, though he doesn’t appear to be in any state to explain either.

“I believe I can explain,” Valkyrie speaks up. “Well. Sort of.” They all patiently sit and listen, as she weaves the most ridiculous tale. It would be entirely unbelievable, but it’s occasionally backed up by Peter, Gamora - though her memories are fuzzy - and Loki, who offers little more explanation but nods in agreement along with her story. Thor doesn’t take his hand off him, keeping it resting soothingly on his back as Loki sits, resting his head on his hands and staring off into the distance.

When the Valkyrie’s finished, Steve nods. “Well. Okay. I’m not going to pretend to understand that, but it seems like we’ve…we’ve got another shot.”

“A second chance,” Strange says. “We’ve reversed a few moves. We might be able to get ahead of Thanos this time.”

“How?” Tony says. “How many times have we fought him, and still lost? What makes it any different this time?”

“Well, it seems like ancient divine beings seem to think this time is different-”

Steve interrupts Strange. “First off, we have to figure out where Thanos is, and how much time we have. Can you two run your trace on the Stones again?”

Jane nods. “The lab looks like it’s been reset like everything else in the world. It will take a bit of time but it will definitely be faster than last time.”

“Right, we just have to redo our work. Just retracing our steps.”

“We can post additional sentries,” Okoye says. “To watch for his return.”

“I’ve got a few satellites that might help with that,” Tony says.

“We should try to contact the Security Council, at least,” Rhodes says. “So they at least know something big’s going down, even if we’re not sure…what yet…”

“I should probably call my aunt?” Peter Parker says. “She’s probably pretty pissed right now.”

Tony grimaces. “Yeah, let’s get you a phone.”

“I think everyone else should take a rest,” Sam says. “We have to be ready for what’s coming and that’s going to be hard with everyone dead on their feet. Stay ready, but take it easy. Some of you look pretty wrecked.”

They all agree to head back to the palace. T’Challa goes off with M’Baku and Okoye to reassure and relieve the confused troops still waiting for commands in the field.

Thor squeezes Loki’s shoulder. “Can you stand?”

“Hm?” Loki, having been lost in thought, jolts at Thor’s words and nods. But when Thor helps him up he wavers for a moment. “I’m fine, just…”

“It’s not every day you act as a conduit for the Norns,” Valkyrie says with a crooked smile.

Thor twitches. He still hasn’t quite processed what their story meant, how the Norns - who he had never been quite sure were actually real - had used them, used their connection forged by trauma, to do something so drastic as to reset time. He keeps a steadying hand on Loki’s back as they head back across the field, mostly for his own comfort.

When they get to the palace Carol murmurs something about borrowing a phone and disappears. Bruce and Jane head off to the lab with Shuri, the others split off into smaller groups. Thor, Loki, and Valkyrie return to the conference room where they had done so much planning. It has been left almost entirely untouched. Valkyrie walks around it, studying all their jumbled notes.

Thor sits Loki down on the bench along one wall, not taking his arm off his shoulder.

“Hey,” Bruce pokes his head in. “So we’ve got Thanos’s bearings. They managed to cast him a long way off. He’s making his way back here, definitely, but not urgently. It seems like he doesn’t know what happened. At least, I feel like if he did he’d be moving a bit quicker.”

“Good.”

“How are you guys doing?” His gaze flits between them.

The Valkyrie laughs. “Oh,” she says. “You know.”

“I’m glad to see you guys. Really. This has been…” He runs his hand through his hair and clears his throat. “I still have the connection to Heimdall,” Bruce says. “They’re probably pretty confused…”

“Right,” Thor says. He makes no move to stand. He knows he should go to tell him what’s going on, but his limbs feel heavy at the thought of it.

Luckily, the Valkyrie volunteers before he has to really think about it. “I’ll go. Stay. I’ll report back.”

“Thank you,” Thor says. She nods at him, touches Loki’s shoulder, and tells Bruce to lead the way.

Alone at last, the brothers sit in silence.

After a while more of watching Loki stare straight ahead and worry at his palm, Thor breaks the silence. “Loki,” Thor reaches out and squeezes his hand. “Say something.”

Loki shakes his head. “What is there to say? All of this is madness. I know what the Norns said would happen but…I still feel…” He shudders. He looks as exhausted and wrung out as Thor feels. “Like none of it was real. It feels far, far away, and I suppose it was. And Thanos is still not dead.”

“He will be,” Thor reassures.

“How can you say that?” Loki spits out.

“We’ve faced him before-”

“Yes, and then he spent weeks torturing us and then he crushed our last defenses and turned half the universe to ash and trapped us in that strange realm and…” Loki’s breath hitches. “He will only do it again. The Norns said that it would be up to us to finish him for good that…that Thanos was trying to balance the scale and he destroyed it and we had to rebuild it-”

“Shhh,” Thor says. “There will be time for that. There will be time for it all, just calm-”

“Do not tell me to calm down!” Loki snaps. He wrenches his hands out of Thor’s grip and then looks like he immediately regrets it and puts them back in his lap, well within Thor’s reach. Thor takes a deep breath to gather his patience, and does not move to touch him.

“What was it like?” Thor asks. “Where you were? The Soul Realm?”

“It was…strange. Not unpleasant, though once we were attacked by some odd creatures from the shadows…” Loki trails off, hand coming up to touch his shoulder. He freezes.

“Loki?”

“What happened here?” His voice is rough. His eyes widen as they finally catch on the thick bunch of bandages wrapped around Thor’s shoulder and upper arm. It had been partially hidden by his cape, but now Loki sees. “What happened?”

Thor hesitates for a moment before answering and knows the hesitation is a mistake. Loki’s jaw sets, his shoulders tense.

“Never mind,” Thor tries to answer quickly, to offset the hesitation. “It’s all right now, I swear, we’ll talk about that later-”

“You were hurt. Tell me how.”

“Not now, you need to rest-”

“ _Tell_ me what happened.”

“It’s fine. Hush.”

“Stop telling me to be quiet!” Loki shouts.

“Okay, okay, look at me.” Thor cups his neck, forcing their gazes together. “I am only telling you to hush because it doesn’t matter now. I am fine. See? I’m fine, it’s nothing to worry about. You’re working yourself into a state, brother. You need to calm down.”

“I can’t. I can’t, not when my skin is crawling and I do not understand what power brought us back, or what to do next, and _he is still out there._ ”

“I know, it’s going to be alright, it will be over soon-”

“So you’ve said before,” Loki snaps, accusing.

The words hurt like piercing blades. Thor closes his eyes. “Yes. I know. I’m _trying,_ Loki.” Thor opens his eyes. “I’m trying. _Norns_.” He means it as a curse but Loki twitches. “I’m trying…I’m trying my best, brother.”

Loki drops his head to his hands, breathing unsteadily. “I’m sorry. I did not mean it.”

“I know.”

“I am just…I am afraid.”

“You don’t need to be afraid,” Thor tries to soothe. “It’s all right, we’re together again-”

“Are we?” Loki whispers back. “Are we back? Are you sure?”

That brings Thor up short. Because in truth, he’s not. It all seems so unbelievable…what if it were all some illusion, or madness brought on by his grief.

Thor swallows his doubts. “Yes,” he says with a certainty he does not quite feel. “Yes, I am sure.” A tear drips down Loki’s cheek. “It’s hard, I know. But I am here.” Loki nods, still not lifting his head. Thor rubs a circle on his back, over and over. “I do not know either what to do next. I do not understand what the Norns have done. But I do know we have been given a second chance. I know you have returned - that you all have returned. I care not how at the present moment. We will fix everything else in time.” Thor settles his hand at the center of his back, feeling how his chest rises and falls under his palm. Alive. A lump of emotion forms in his throat. “This is the third time, Loki, that I thought you dead.”

“Three times,” Loki says dully. “Everything comes in threes.”

The non sequitur leaves Thor puzzled. But before he can ask, Loki lifts his head. There is no madness in his eyes, only exhaustion. “I’m sorry,” he says again.

“You have nothing to apologize for.” Thor offers him a faint smile. “Will you not let me take comfort in your safe and whole presence, just for a few hours? We will deal with the rest later.”

Loki nods. He tolerates being pulled into Thor’s arms, being maneuvered until he half curled up, practically in Thor’s lap. He rests his head on Thor’s shoulder and sighs. “I fear this is far from over,” he says quietly.

“I know.” Because Thor feels it too. Feels Thanos looming in the background, like he’s hiding in the shadows waiting. Thor tightens his grip on Loki, feeling a surge of protective fury rise up to meet his fear. He will not allow Thanos to take this from him again. He will not allow Thanos to take _anything_ from him again. Even if it kills him.

“I _saw_ the Norns bend time and fate to bring us back. They said that they had never interfered so much in mortal affairs and never would again. That Thanos had thrown the whole universe out of balance and if we did not fix it…it would be the end of everything. I fear we’re on the edge of tipping into the abyss, I _can’t-_ ”

“Shh, rest. We won’t, we can…we’ll figure it out. We’ll _fix_ this.” Thor tucks Loki’s head under his chin and holds him until he calms enough to fall asleep.

Thor doesn’t sleep himself. He just sits quietly in the semi-darkness, feeling Loki breathe and holding back tears of relief.

But the relief doesn’t last. It’s eaten away by doubt, by a grim certainty that this can only be a temporary reprieve. He still needs to kill Thanos, to rectify his own failures. But all he has done before has come up short. He needs to do more, to give more to ensure the universe survives. A small voice whispers to him that this might be the end. Thor will welcome it, if it means that Thanos will be dead and they will never be hurt again. He begins to understand that taking Thanos’s life likely means giving up his own, and it is a price that he accepts.

He buries his face in Loki’s hair and gently rocks him as he sleeps. How sad, Thor thinks, that they could only be reunited for such a short time.

Valkyrie finds them like that an hour later. Loki is out cold, still tucked in Thor’s arms. He doesn’t even stir when she touches his shoulder.

“All’s well with Heimdall. They didn’t even remember anything happened, just noticed a blip in their instrument readings. I told them to hold steady.”

“Good. Thank you.”

“I figured you had your hands full.” She smiles. “They’ve got a couple rooms set up, beds. Bruce says we’ve got some time.”

“We all need the rest. For what’s to come.”

Valkyrie nods, her expression dark. “Yes. What’s to come.” She sighs.

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine, I guess. Feels…strange. I’d just gotten used to the feeling of that place. And now…it feels cold here? But like my body isn’t quite mine anymore.”

“But you’re back,” Thor says quickly. “And no matter what happens, I will not let Thanos…” He swallows. “I will not let you be taken away again. Either of your. I swear.”

Her smile is tired. “If you say so, your majesty.”

She helps him bundle Loki, still sleeping soundly, into his arms and leads him to a spare office, not too far away from the lab, that’s been quickly converted to a bedroom. When she goes to leave, Thor stops her.

“Stay. They’ll find us if we’re needed.”

They settle into the guest room that looks as though it had been an office mere hours before. The mattress is narrow and it’s awkward but with a bit of shuffling they fit together. Loki still does not wake, just breathes evenly and turns towards Thor. Valkyrie drapes her arm over Loki’s waist, rests her forehead against his back.

For a few hours, they sleep like the dead.

Loki does not dream. He’s too exhausted, too worn to the bone to dream. He’s not even really sure he’s even fully asleep, just too tired to move. He hears when the Valkyrie enters, hears their quiet voices and the rumble in Thor’s chest. He feels himself being carried. It’s only when the three of them are settled in the dark room that he cascades into a black pit and knows nothing for several hours.

He comes awake gradually. His first thoughts are all trying to figure out where he is. He can tell he is not lying on the ground. He is inside, judging from the still air. It is dark. He feels the Valkyrie’s arm on his waist, as they sometimes slept in the Soul Realm, but is also tucked into Thor’s chest, as they’d become accustomed to sleeping in Lithuania. Loki’s exhausted mind cannot choose which of the two situations is more likely. He’s afraid to open his eyes to see, afraid that either Thor will be gone or the Valkyrie would be. In his groggy, exhausted state, he cannot wrap his mind around the thought that time has moved forward. That he has met the Norns and survived and they are all three together. It seems too impossible to be true.

For now, Loki keeps his eyes shut. He wants to live in this illusion a little longer.

It’s only interrupted at a knock on the door. Thor jumps and then sits up. Loki opens his eyes and no one vanishes. The Valkyrie groans behind him.

There’s a flood of shocked relief, followed by panic as Thor begins to move away. He reaches out and grabs Thor’s arm hard, keeping him from moving away.

Thor gives him a faint, tired smile. “Yes?” he calls out, instead of going to answer.

“There will be a meeting in twenty minutes,” a voice says through the door. “All are called to assemble.”

The rest pieces itself together in Loki’s mind. Thanos, still out there, making his way ever closer, like a predator stalking its prey. It takes work not to start screaming. His heart beats faster, a shake starting in his hands that he only suppresses by squeezing harder on Thor’s arm.

Thor winces and covers Loki’s hand with his own. “We’ll be there,” he calls back and footsteps retreat. “How are you feeling?”

“Better,” the Valkyrie answers.

“Yes. Better.” He is. His head is much clearer now than it had been following their mass resurrection. Before he’d slept, he was dizzy with the aftereffects of the Norns’ working, giddy with relief at being reunited with Thor, but overwhelmed at the sudden harshness of the real world after so long in the Soul one. Everything felt too bright, too hot, too loud. He wasn’t quite sure what he was seeing was real. Sleep cleared most of that fogginess, but in its place comes fear born of clarity. Thanos is still out there. They are still in mortal peril.

Loki glances at Thor’s shoulder, at the bandages still visible and thinks of the ache in his own shoulder. How he felt being woken up from nightmares by the pain and dreadful certainty that something was wrong.

But he also remembers how Thor had reacted the day before when he asked. He says nothing.

“We’d better go,” Valkyrie says. “Time to get back to work.”

“Brother,” Thor says quietly to him. “Are you up to this? You can rest still-”

“No. I’m fine. There will be no true rest until he is gone.” _Finish what we started,_ the Norns triple voices whisper in his ear. _But how?_ He thinks back.

Thor, looking grave, nods.

The meeting is chaos before they even walk in the door. Everyone looks ragged, red-eyed. There aren’t enough chairs so some are leaning against the wall. Thor makes sure he finds a seat and stands behind him, keeping a protective hand on his shoulder. Loki wants to protest the coddling but he equally does not think he could stand for much longer, and is not particularly interested in being very far away from Thor. Everyone is talking at once, voices blending together in an overwhelming cacophony.

“Thanos is on his way,” T’Challa’s voice cuts through the others. “He will be here in a few hours.”

“And he’ll be on the warpath,” Rhodes says. “Super pissed.”

“Why isn’t he using the gauntlet? He still has it, right?” Sam asks.

“We can only assume so,” Strange says.

Valkyrie nods. “The Norns said that they would bring us back, but said nothing about destroying the gauntlet.”

“He’ll still have it,” Loki says. “It will be up to us to destroy it.”

“Okay, but that doesn’t answer Sam’s question,” Bucky says. “Why hasn’t he used the gauntlet to jump in to surprise us? Or just repeat what he’s done? Shouldn’t we be preparing for that?”

“It was damaged,” Thor says. “When he…when he murdered half the universe. He has used it since, but perhaps wants to conserve its power, prevent further damage.”

“He brought an army to Earth last time,” Natasha says. “He showed up to conquer it, as his big prize.” Loki frowns. He’s unsure if she means before the Snap, or if there was another time after. Thor’s hand tightens on his shoulder. “He might want to stay with them, bring them here to keep conquering.”

“And he probably doesn’t know we’ve reversed the Snap,” Steve says. “He probably still thinks he’s got the upper hand, got the power.”

“Probably thinks you found some magic spell to banish him, not understanding the true magnitude of the working,” Strange supplies.

Steve nods. “So he feels like he doesn’t think he needs to rush back to crush us.”

“That’s just like him,” Gamora says. “He was always patient, even at the end. You’d think he’d have wanted to hurry things along but he took his time.”

“Savored his victory,” Nebula growls.

“So what are we sitting around here for?” Tony seems keyed up with nervous energy. “Let’s get the big guns ready, let’s go after them-”

“Because that worked so well last time,” Bucky says.

“We threw everything we had at him and his army. This time, he already has all the Stones. And once he figures out what’s happened, he’ll just use them again,” Wanda says. “We’ll be back where we started.”

A pall falls over the room. Thor’s hand is shaking on Loki’s shoulder.

“We won’t let that happen,” he says in a wavering voice.

“But how do we defeat them? Did these Norns actually say-”

“They said that…death would not be enough,” Loki says. “That…it would be magic that would do it.” His head pulses in pain. There’s something he’s missing, a piece of his memory that’s not coming together. It’s taking the shape of a ritual, but it’s like half of it is blurred.

“Magic…so magic would kill Thanos or destroy the Stones?”

Loki shrugs. “Both?”

“I destroyed one Stone already,” Wanda says. “And Thanos just found a way to bring him back. I killed Vision for nothing. How will magic help us now?”

“I don’t know…”

“Now’s not really the time for ‘I don’t know’,” Clint remarks irritably.

“We’d have to destroy them all at once,” Loki says. “But I do not know how.”

“So what are we arguing about?” Tony says. “Who cares about the whole magic mumbo-jumbo shit-” Loki tenses and Thor squeezes his shoulder again. “Time to go back to war.”

“A frontal assault is a big risk,” Strange says. “And repeating what was done in the past runs the risk of repeating what went wrong before.

“But we’re all together this time. We’re not split between here and Titan,” Tony continues. “We fire up the big guns, we charge at him, get the gauntlet, blast it to pieces-”

“I don’t think it’s that simple,” Loki snaps. “It can’t be.”

“They fought him three times after we died,” Bucky says suddenly. Loki glances up. Sam also looks surprised. Steve isn’t looking at either of them, staring dead ahead. “Got beat three times.”

Thor’s wounded shoulder. How close had he been to death? Loki stands abruptly, knocking Thor’s hand off his shoulder.

“We are only going to our dooms. Fighting Thanos is dying again, that much I know is certain.”

“We face death either way,” Natasha says. “What would you have us do?”

“We need to find a way to distract him, to throw him off. We need to buy ourselves more time. We need to retreat.”

“How much time would that take though?” Sam says gently. “I see your point, Loki, I know you’re scared of losing again, but we can’t just run with our tails between our legs.”

“Besides what are we supposed to tell everyone?” Tony says. “It’s a miracle they haven’t already started demanding results.”

“Fury’s keeping them calm,” Natasha says. “I talked to him and Maria on the phone. He’s assuring them we’re on it. They’re rattled, dealing with the aftereffects but before long…”

“They’re not going to be satisfied forever.” Rhodes shakes his head. “And they’re not going to accept that we need to retreat and figure out some magic way to defeat Thanos.”

“We need to finish this. We can’t take any more time. We’ve got to beat him _now._ ”

“Thanos has to be defeated. I’m with Tony,” Steve says. Tony looks surprised and Loki feels a sting of betrayal. “We can’t put this off. We saw…” He clears his throat. “We saw what happens if Thanos wins. We saw it. We’ve got to beat him.”

“We can’t run from it.” The sting turns to a stabbing pain at Thor’s voice from behind him. Loki turns slowly. Thor shakes his head. “We can’t run from it.”

“Thor…” Loki feels like he’s going to be sick. “But…”

“Okay, so a frontal assault,” Carol says. “We throw everything at him again, but this time we’ve got me, and her,” she gestures at Wanda. “And the fancy lightning axe. And we focus our attack on the Gauntlet.”

“It didn’t work when we tried before,” Natasha says with a frown. “He still dodged everything we threw at him.”

“Yeah, but there weren’t so many of us then,” Rocket says. “We’ve got everyone back, and if we can surprise him with that. Overwhelm him with numbers.”

“We’ll still have to worry about the Black Order,” Gamora says. “HIs armies.”

“We can take care of the armies,” T’Challa nods.

“Okay, so we divide the attack,” Steve says. “Make sure that we keep someone on Thanos at all times, keep barraging him, while the others keep the Black Order occupied.”

“There will be more time once we assemble our troops to discuss the plans,” T’Challa says. “But our focus must be on killing Thanos.”

“And with Stormbreaker, we just might be able to do it,” Thor says.

Loki shakes his head. “Something still feels wrong. I don’t think this is the right way. This will only get us all killed again and allow Thanos to destroy the entirety of the universe.”

“I have to agree with Loki,” Gamora says. Loki looks up, surprised, and their eyes meet. “As much as I want to see Thanos dead,” she looks to Nebula, who folds her arms. “Something feels wrong with this approach. Thanos is too powerful to be destroyed with brute force, even if we all work collectively.”

“Yeah and I don’t remember what happened with the whole…Norns thing in a lot of detail,” Peter says. “It’s all getting pretty fuzzy. But they seemed to think Thanos was going to take a lot more than force to put down.”

“I saw nothing after our return…” Strange says. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean there is nothing…”

“But what are you all suggesting? What magic are you fucking talking about?” Tony shouts. “God, I’m so sick of magic.”

“I do not know,” Loki says through gritted teeth. “Yet. But if you give me some time, if we can just think for a moment-”

“We do not have time,” T’Challa says. “We have to ready our defenses now. I am sorry.”

“Okay, that settles it,” Steve says. “We get ready to attack on our terms. Lead him back here, where we know the battleground.”

“This won’t work,” Loki says, his voice ruined. “You know it won’t. You know I’m right.”

Steve meets his eyes and then looks away guiltily.

“Brother…” Thor starts, laying a hand on his back. Loki shies away.

“I need a moment to think.” Before Thor can say anything else, Loki pushes past him without looking him in the eye.

Loki retreats to the hallway, pacing and trying to think. He has no magic books, no clues, and no ability to ask for help. He is in the dark and whatever task the Norns had set for him slips further away. Frustrated, he paces and tries to think, tries to figure out a way to figure out what the Norns meant him to do, how to convince the others to retreat, to give them another chance.

He’s about to go find Gamora, force through his lingering fear of her and her sister to ask her what else she remembered, when the Valkyrie finds him, looking drawn.

“Why don’t you think that this is what the Norns meant?” she asks without preamble. “To face him and kill him, then destroy the Stones.”

“It feels too simple. It feels wrong. Like I know in my heart that it won’t work.”

She grabs his hand. “And if that’s just your fear talking?”

“You saw them, you know them. There is some magic here that we’re missing, they said that…we would need a ritual.” His head pulses in pain. He presses a hand to the side of his head.

“Do you think there’s something they’re not telling us? About what happened when we were gone?”

“Why do you ask?”

The Valkyrie shrugs. “I just…I get the sense that Thor’s holding something back. He won’t be budged. He’s intending on going straight for Thanos himself.”

That sends a pierce of panic through him. He has half a mind to find some way to keep Thor off the battlefield, to bind him with magic or send him somewhere else. “He’ll die.”

The Valkyrie bites her lip. “But with Stormbreaker…”

Before she can finish her sentence, Thor enters. He is dressed in his armor and carrying the axe, followed closely behind by Steve.

Loki freezes. “Where are you going?”

“Where am I going? Where else, I am going to kill Thanos. I will not fail this time.”

“He’ll be landing soon. T’Challa’s gone to give orders. We’re going to lead the troops. All of us. If we stick together, we might have a chance.”

“Might,” Loki says with a ruined voice. “And if we fail now, if we go to fight him and are again defeated, that is the end.”

“It is the end either way, brother,” Thor says gently. “I would rather face it standing on my feet.”

“Thor, wait-” He moves to push past, but Loki blocks him. “This is mad, you know this is mad. Thanos has it out for you, you’re just _throwing_ yourself at him.”

“What do you expect us to do?”

“Not _this,_ just give me a chance-”

“Loki,” Thor says, impatient. Loki glances between his and Steve’s faces.

It’s all spinning out of his control. Those who were left behind when the others were turned to dust all bear a heavy burden, the weight of their trauma leaning heavy on their shoulders. Their refusal to speak of it only makes it seem darker, more consuming a shadow. Terrible things happened here while they were gone, haunting things.

“Thor, _please_.”

“I am not going to abandon our allies, I am not going to let him get away again.”

“I’m not asking you to give up, I’m asking you to _help_ me-”

“And what would you have me do?”

“Not this, not throwing yourself at him.”

“Loki, after all he has done to us,” Thor’s voice is rough. “We deserve revenge. I _want_ revenge.”

“You’re just going to get yourself killed.” A tear rolls down Loki’s cheek. “You’re not _thinking._ ”

“This is nothing left to think about.”

Thor tries to push past him again, but Loki holds his ground. “He has it out for you in particular. I know he came for you. I know you nearly died.” A look of comprehension dawns on the Valkyrie’s face. She glances between Thor’s bandaged shoulder and Loki. “He wants us dead, desperately. We cannot just _throw_ ourselves at him, without thought, without-”

“I know of no other way.”

“Thor, just _think-_ ”

“Your majesty…” the Valkyrie says. “I think Loki is right. I think this is an error, one that might cost us.”

“You told me, before we separated, that laying down my life and my magic was not an unacceptable outcome.”

“And you said we must not run from this end.”

Loki rears back. He laughs grimly, with tears blurring his vision. “Is that what you believe now? I go away and you become the fatalistic one.”

“You did not _go away,_ Loki!” Thor shouts suddenly, his measured grimness turning to anger. He seizes Loki’s arms and shakes him. “Do you understand? You _died._ You dissolved into ash before my eyes. You, and _trillions_ of others dissolved into ash.” His voice breaks. “I had the chance to kill him, and I didn’t, and he turned the universe into a graveyard. And I thought you were gone, forever. I told the others I didn’t believe you were dead. I was lying. You weren’t here, Loki, you didn’t see how the world fell apart. And I knew that was happening, across all worlds, because of _me.”_ Thor takes a trembling breath. “I had another chance, and again I failed. The Norns have given us another chance. This must be what they meant. That I need to kill him this time, on the same field, before he can do it. If that means giving up my life…perhaps that is the exchange. That is the balance to be restored. You knew that, before. I was the one who needed to learn that bitter lesson. And I am sorry, that I have to remind you of it again. I wish there was another way, but there _isn’t,_ brother.”

“You can’t kill him, Thor. He has the Gauntlet, you cannot kill him so easily. You _fool,_ ” Loki beats furiously at his chest. “That’s not what the Norns spoke of, it can’t be…this doesn’t make sense- _”_

“It doesn’t matter,” Tony Stark says as he enters.

“Haven’t you done enough?” Loki snaps.

“Look, it doesn’t matter. We’ve decided. He’s on his way and we’re going to meet him and end this.”

“Of course, you were never going to believe me-”

Thor shifts Loki away, putting Stark out of his eyeline and wrapping a gentle hand on the back of his neck to redirect his focus. “This is the end. The one the Norns have prepared for us. We can do nothing else but face it.”

Loki shakes his head. “You’re wrong.” He turns to the Valkyrie. “ _Help_ me.”

“Your majesty-”

“We are not going to run, Loki-”

“There _must_ be something more.”

“Just because your schemes always had so many twists and turns does not mean the universe operates that way,” Thor says with a sad smile. “It does not. It is often cruel in its directness. So often fate has no larger scheme.”

“There must be something more. Or else, why have we endured it all?” There are sobs building in his throat. He tries to swallow them down but his breath hitches. “I believe we are going to lose again if we face him head on. We will only face more death.”

“I wish there was another way. I wish we had more time. But if we can take him out with us…” Thor smiles sadly. “We must not run from it.”

Loki hesitates another moment, looking between his brother and the Valkyrie. She shakes her head. Then Loki finally caves, unhappily. “I still believe we are going to lose. Only promise me that when the tide turns, we will retreat to fight another day. That you will not throw away-”

“Fine,” Thor says. “Fine.” Though the expression on his face is not comforting.

“Give us more time,” Loki implores.

“I would give you an eternity of peace, if I could,” Thor says, quietly enough that the others won’t hear. He kisses Loki’s forehead. His hand is heavy on the back of Loki’s neck.

T’Challa appears at the doorway. “Are you ready?”

Tony nods and follows him out. Thor remains behind, looking at his brother before shaking his head. “I do not know what’s gotten into you, Loki. I would have thought you’d leap at our second chance to slay Thanos.” Thor turns to go.

“I saw Mother,” Loki says. Thor freezes. “In that place. We traveled down a river into the underworld and…and there was a raven and a fire and then Mother was there.” Fresh tears well in his eyes. “We have to survive. For her. She didn’t want us to throw our lives away. She believed in the Norns-”

“She believed in the Norns, and they brought you back. It is up to us to finish it.” Thor laughs without humor. “What a grand end to Asgard…”

Loki shakes his head. “There must be something else. You may not be a master seer, Thor, but surely you can _see.”_

“I have had no _visions,_ ” Thor snaps, a momentary outburst before he deflates and his gaze shifts guiltily away, like he’s lying about something. “I have had no hope, none, these past weeks. I will not let Thanos triumph again.” Thor turns away, his cape sweeping over the floor, and leaves Loki to wipe away his tears.

Loki stays standing stock still for a minute after they leave. The Valkyrie stays with him, saying nothing. Then Loki takes a deep breath, and turns to walk quickly in the opposite direction.

“Where are you going?” the Valkyrie says, torn between following him or following Thor. After a second, she follows Loki, quickly catching up. “I said-”

“I’m going to find Strange,” he says. “Perhaps he can give us some answers.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [whispers to self] "I'm not going to over-explain to justify myself, I'm not going to over-explain to justify myself..." 
> 
> Okay, rational thought is not, er, present in a lot of this decision making. They're panicking and not thinking clearly, and desperate to stop Thanos as soon as possible, not taking into account that maybe they should listen to the ones who actually interacted with the strange beings that brought them back? Yeah, acting irrationally but, who would be acting rationally in such a situation?
> 
> There are also probably...some holes in the mechanics of the Norns' time manipulations and magic in general and such but...I'm sticking by it...
> 
> It's magic. They're omnipotent but fickle creatures. Who knows what's going through their minds? (This note may or may not also apply to the next chapter...)
> 
> Also, writing this size cast was a _nightmare_. I tried to include as many people as I could in conversations but like...everyone's there. Just trust that everyone's there. XD Also, gave myself a heart attack today, because I was missing half this chapter, and all of the next, but it turns out I have multiple backup folders (accidentally saved a copy instead of overwriting like I usually do) so...last week's chapter might have been a slightly earlier form? I clearly didn't notice, so the difference can't be that drastic, but I'm going to double check to see if it's worth fixing. If there are subtle changes on rereads, that's why. 
> 
> Last note, this is one of my more obvious song lyric chapter titles, it is now stuck in my head.
> 
> Next week: They've got another chance at stopping the apocalypse. Better make this one count.
> 
> (Next week is - shockingly - the last full chapter! Then I have a relatively short epilogue I'll be posting on the following Sunday.) Happy Friday! As always, comments/kudos/shares/frogs always appreciated and I hope you enjoyed this long awaited reunion. <3


	10. The Ritual

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The last chance to stop Thanos and save the universe before it's too late.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings: just a continued warning for a similar style of violence as we've been dealing with. this is a bit of a battle-heavy chapter.
> 
> enjoy! (I really, really hope you folks enjoy this last chapter. Really TT_TT)

_“Nornir appear to represent notions of inevitability in a broad and unapproachable sense; they are strongly linked to death and to ideas concerning judgement but also to transitions more generally.”_

_-Karen Bek-Pedersen, The Norns in Old Norse Mythology_

“‘No combatants under under 18,’ what a bullshit rule.” Peter Parker scratches his head. “‘Your aunt is already going to kill me, Peter’ ‘You should wait until you’re old enough to vote to die saving the world’, I mean I’ve already died saving the world, right?”

Shuri shrugs, not taking her eyes off the tracking screen. “I think we’ll get our chance to fight,” she says. “That is what happened last time. Those alien creatures made their way all the way to my lab. Destroyed a lot of _very_ expensive equipment.”

“Well…good. We’ll defend up here.”

“Try not to break anything, Peter Parker.” Shuri grins.

Jane rushes down from the upper part of the lab. “Get them on the comms. Thanos is entering the atmosphere.”

When they catch up to Strange, the battle is almost upon them. A tide moving faster than they can keep up with.

“I believe you, but I know nothing,” Strange says. “I was only shown that we had to be on the other side of the barrier to be brought back. That for whatever reason if we hadn’t ended up there, if we had simply died, Thanos’s victory would have been irreversible.”

“They had no other anchor.” Loki touches the still aching spot in his chest. “But what more? Facing Thanos head on will only bring us back to death. We will be right where we began, perhaps worse off.”

Strange shakes his head. “I have no idea. I haven’t been able to see anything past that point.”

“That’s what my mother said, that there had been no visions of the future. That this could be the end of time, if we were not careful.” When Loki closes his eyes he sees the weaving, the loom stretching up to the ceiling. He opens them again and his eyes fall on Wanda, sitting quietly and gazing across the field. His gaze slides to Gamora, standing close to Peter. Their eyes meet for a second and then Loki looks away. It is more than his usual fear when he looks at her. It’s like in her eyes he can see the Soul Stone. When he looks at her, he can feel the remote barrenness of that realm, feel death nipping at his heels. She had been shaped by it, when she acted as the sacrifice to release it from its prison, then as their guide to the Norns. He cannot look at her.

Carol Danvers, a woman he has only met briefly, cuts across his vision, walking with purpose over to Steve. They exchange a few words and then she grins confidently. “Don’t worry,” she says louder. “You’ve got me this time.” She claps her hands and yellow light appears at her palms. Loki knows that power. The Tesseract’s. He finds he can’t look upon her for very long either.

Strange is speaking, but Loki is only half listening. “…I know you think we’re missing something, but I

“What’s more than two?” Loki says under his breath. Before he can dwell on it any longer, a shout goes up from the advance troops.

Thanos is here.

“We should probably stick together,” the Valkyrie says. She wraps her hand around his wrist. “Okay? Just stay close.” She shifts nervously. “Does something feel…really off to you?”

“Everything feels off. It feels out of my control. It does…it feels wrong.” The feeling of wrongness pervades his whole being. At his words, Sam glances back and there is an echo of his discomfort in Sam’s eyes.

“I think I can hear a drum,” the Valkyrie says. She draws her sword. But before Loki can ask her what she means, the assault begins.

Thanos rains fire down on Wakanda. They’d lured him here, turning off all cloaking devices to broadcast their presence openly. So Thanos returns to where this had all began. There is no more time for decisions, no more time for decoding what the Norns could have possibly meant. There is only the battle.

Thanos sends the creatures first, then the Black Order, just as it had been the first time. They did their best to disguise their numbers, to hold off the inevitable as long as possible, but when Thanos’s army finally breaks through the barrier and they charge, Thanos looks upon them and his expression twists in fury.

“How? _How?”_ Thanos raises his hand to snap again-

And Nebula drives a knife into his arm with a shriek. He throws her off, she tucks into a roll and regains her feet, but before Thanos can snap, Peter fires directly at the Gauntlet.

“Not this time, asshole,” Peter takes over where Nebula has fallen back, then Carol behind him. They’ve learned from their combined experiences with Thanos. The battle is a refraction of the first, rather than a reflection. There are some things that are the same, the blood streaking across the grass, the alien shrieks, and some that are different, as they coordinate, use their powers together to keep Thanos on the defensive.

They drive him back. But still he fights, growing angrier and angrier.

“None of you understand, none of you will ever understand,” Thanos growls. “I am _inevitable_.”

He raises his hand to snap again and no one is ready to stop him - but nothing happens. The Stones sparkle in their settings but feel like they’re underwater, like they’re cloaked by something. Thanos hears voices - three voices - screaming in his ear and he stumbles back, pain shooting up his arm.

He steals a staff from a fallen Chitauri soldier and raises it just in time to block as a sword strikes at his chest. For a moment, he doesn’t recognize the attacker, so disbelieving.

Gamora holds his gaze. “Hello, _‘Father’._ ”

“Gamora…how?”

“I don’t know. But I do know that you will be stopped this time.”

“I thought you understood,” He knocks her sword away with the staff and stabs it at her, but she parries his stroke. “Even when you betrayed me I hoped that I could make you see reason. I see now it is hopeless. You made a better sacrifice than a daughter!”

They duel on the field, until she too is forced to fall back. Thanos’s rage fuels him, his lust for power. Quickly he regains use of the Gauntlet, and uses it to mow down scores of soldiers. His armies keep coming, mindless beasts, and slowly, despite all of their best efforts, the tide of the battle turns towards him.

All around the field of battle, the Avengers are slowly overwhelmed. Thanos holds his ground. They slip closer to destruction.

In the Wakandan palace, Shuri stares at the monitor, watching the fight.

“Still not fair that we’re stuck up here,” Peter Parker says. “I get turned to dust _one_ time and I get sidelined. Not fair.”

“They’re going to lose.”

“They _can’t._ ”

Shuri frowns at the monitor. “They will.”

Loki kills one beast with a knife to the throat, then another with a bolt of magic. He struggles to keep one eye on Thor - who is busy destroying one of Thanos’s ships with lightning, the sky black with the storm - and the other on the Valkyrie fighting beside him. They’re trying to fight their way closer to Thanos, to the Gauntlet, but the hordes of beasts surround them.

At a break, Loki pauses to catch his breath and starts to plot a path towards Thanos. The Hulk passes by, roaring as he crushes the alien beasts. Loki smiles as the Hulk makes his way along. In his wake, is a cleared path, Loki should be able to cover some ground before being beset again-

Before he can start however, his eyes catch on a group of Wakandan soldiers as they freeze in their tracks. One kills the others with his spear and then drops it, letting the creatures consume him. It happens in a second, too fast for anyone to stop it.

“Hello, Loki,” A horrifically familiar voice says in his head. “Did you miss me?” Ebony Maw’s power presses on his mind, sliding inside like he never left it. Loki’s control over his body leaves him, turning him into a limp puppet. The knife in his right hand drops to the ground, but the one in his left raises, flipping the point back towards himself. He resists, fights hard against the pull to drive the blade into the veins and arteries in his own neck.

“No,” he hisses through gritted teeth. “I banish you from my mind. I will not tolerate this violation any longer.”

his mother had taught him how to ward his mind. He had cultivated the shields through years of study and painful practice only to have them all destroyed violently when he first fell to Sanctuary. He takes a deep breath, hand shaking hard on the knife, and calls upon those long centuries of practice, whispers the words of a spell, and throws Ebony Maw out of his mind.

Maw howls in pain at the reverberation of the spell. It hurts Loki as well, he nearly vomits from the pain of it, but manages to strike out at Maw with the knife. Maw blocks, laughing. “I’ll have you back, you won’t escape that easily, you’re mine-”

The Valkyrie’s sword emerges from his eye socket. He twitches for a moment more, then the corpse goes still.

She roughly yanks her sword out of Maw’s skull and drops the body to the ground.

“Thank you,” Loki gasps around panting breaths. His mind feels shaken, bruised, and there’s a pulsing pain in his temples. Blood drips from his nose and ears.

“Highness, are you-”

A concussive bomb detonates. It had been dropped from the ship and struck the ground not far from them. The explosion renders the world black and noiseless for a moment. Loki comes to on his side, coughing up dust and rubble. He tries to get to his feet, but only makes it as far as his hands before he needs to stop. His mouth tastes like copper, but he’s unsure if it’s coming from the nosebleed or something deeper, considering the way his insides feel sickeningly shifted.

The drumbeat, pounding in his eyes like it had in the final moments before the snap. There’s a sound like chanting now, nearly drowned out by the ringing in his ears. He coughs a breath and staggers to his feet. “Valkyrie!” He cries, but she is nowhere in sight. Two of the snarling beasts charge him and he weakly dispatches them. _“Brunnhilde!”_ Nothing.

He can’t seem to catch his breath. His heartbeat begins to stutter in his chest. When the next wave of alien creatures charge at him, lightning strikes, obliterating them all. Loki drops to his knees as Thor lands next to him, catching his shoulder.

“Brother-”

“Go,” Loki gasps. “You have to kill Thanos.”

“Hold on, brother-” Cull Obsidian appears suddenly and diverts Thor’s attention. Thor keeps protectively close to Loki as he tries to recover enough to fight again.

He turns his attention to the epicenter.

At the epicenter of the fight, Tony Stark in his suit is facing Thanos now. The others fight against the remaining Black Order, against Thanos’s armies, but it is no use. The tides are against them. Something is wrong.

He suddenly hears a warning cry that sounds like Wanda’s voice. He turns - she has stopped a creature from killing Steve. She shifts her weight to cast it away, when a Chitauri soldier drives its staff through her torso from behind. Wanda chokes and her magic dissipates as Steve rushes forward to catch her, crying out-

At the exact moment the stake is driven through Wanda’s chest, the atmospheric pressure pops. Time seems to slow. The stormy sky turns black.

Three voices speak as one.

“ _NO_.”

A piercing whistling sound, the wind blows. Then everything goes dark.

In the blackness, the voices whisper. “ _This is your last chance._ ”

Loki opens his eyes to a clear blue sky.

\- - -

Thanos bellows, a deep, beastly roar that echoes through the ship.

“Magic,” Ebony Maw says. “Some magic has cast us back here?” He holds a shaking hand to his head.

“Some magic?” Cull Obsidian snarls. “Did you hear that voice?”

Thanos roars again. “They think they can stop me, they think their power is enough? I will root out every mage, every spellcaster, every single one of them with so-called power until there is none left!” Thanos clenches the gauntlet. He is gripped with fury. “Do they not understand? They are but gnats. They cast us away, they have the power to do that, but for how much longer? We will beat at them ceaselessly, we will gather as much firepower as is needed to crush them into dust. Do they not understand _I AM INEVITABLE!”_ His voice rings out over the ship, echoing in the tense silence. He takes a moment to get himself under control, to rein in his fury. He runs his fingers over the Stones, where they sparkle in the gauntlet. “I will root them out,” he says. “Magic, it must be some spell. We will _burn_ the magic out of the universe, until there is none left but those loyal to me. It will not be enough this time, to reduce them to ash. Somehow they managed to return. No. I will _break them_. I will bleed them dry. I will cut their throats and cut their bodies to ribbons. When I find the sorcerer responsible for this, I will ensure that they know pain before I kill them.” Thanos has his suspicions. He smiles. The Asgardian had always been a treacherous snake. He should have known not to simply accept the wretch dissolving into ash. He will make his screams like music to listen to while he conquers the rest of the universe. He will not let him die until he has long begun begging for it.

“Of course, master,” Ebony Maw says. “We will help you do it.”

“Good. Muster our forces. Get us ready for the attack again. We will not fail a third time.”

“Of course not, master.”

“What the fuck? What the _fuck?”_ Someone is saying, over and over. Maybe Sam. Loki can’t quite tell. The ringing in his ears is slow to recede.

They cautiously rouse themselves. This time they are too shocked for the passionate, relieved embraces that marked their first resurrections. There are some quiet reunions, reassurances that others are whole. Loki finds he can’t yet rise but he reaches out a hand and finds the Valkyrie’s wrist. She sits up, but doesn’t remove his hand from her wrist, laying her hand flat over his. Thor kneels next to him, touching his shoulder for reassurance.

Wanda scrambles to her knees groping at her chest and gasping. Clint rushes to her, but she is uninjured.

“I am fine, I’m fine…”

“Highness?” the Valkyrie whispers. “Are you okay?” Loki nods, still catching his breath.

“What…what happened?” Peter Parker says, stunned. “Shuri and I…we were just…and now?”

“I think…I think time’s reset?” Bruce checks the time on his phone. “Yeah, it’s when we came back before.”

“Did you all hear that? That voice? Jesus, what the fuck was that?” Sam is aghast.

“I don’t know.” Steve is pale, hand very tight on Bucky’s shoulder.

“That was the Norns,” the Valkyrie supplies.

Peter nods. “Yup.”

“But what did they…”

“They reset time,” Strange says like it’s the most natural thing. But even his hand shakes when he runs it through his hair. “Again.”

“They’ve given us another chance,” Loki says. He finally feels himself enough to gingerly sit up. “I think it will be our last one.” Thor’s hand rubs a circle on his shoulder. When Loki glances at his brother’s face, it is twisted with guilt. He almost wants to sneer _see? See what you get when you don’t listen to me?_ but it feels too cruel.

“Okay but…how?” Tony says. “How the fuck-”

“Thanos has the Time Stone…they must have some other way of doing it…”

“They don’t need a talisman or a spell…they’re just…that’s what they _do,_ ” Loki says.

“I thought they were…they were _seers,_ that’s what the myths-”

“Have you not been around us long enough to know what whatever you were told is _wrong?”_ Loki runs a hand through his hair. He still doesn’t feel strong enough to stand. “The Norns are not mere witches. They are…they are _fate_ and time. They’re not…they’re not _gods,_ not in the way you would understand it. They’re not…they’re not really all powerful, but they are omniscient. They can direct the streams of time, they can direct the fates of the universe.”

“So why the _hell_ haven’t we been going to them this whole time?”

“This is just my perspective,” Peter says, hands up. “But as someone who was there, they didn’t seem all that open to suggestion.”

“The Norns have their own ways, their own agendas. They do not often share those thoughts with mortals,” Thor says. “They rarely are so open with their intervention. They bend the fates of mortals, but often in ways that are beyond notice or speculation. This is…”

“Unprecedented,” The Valkyrie finishes. “I’m a lot older than all of you, a lot older than them even,” She gestures at Thor and Loki. “And I’ve never heard of the Norns acting like this. Never. Not even against Hela, not even at Ragnarök. This is… _unprecedented_.”

“The threat to the universe that Thanos poses is that grave,” Gamora says.

“We’ve seen what happens if we fail,” Steve says. “We’ve seen that it would be _universal_ annihilation if he gets his way.”

“And they cannot allow that to happen.”

Gamora laughs, humorlessly. Nebula lets out a snarl and stabs a knife into the ground. “Sometimes, when he was really raving,” Gamora says. “He would say that it was going to be a grand sacrifice to death. That it would be the greatest sacrifice to ever be offered in the history of the universe.”

Stunned silence falls, only interrupted suddenly by Shuri’s wide-eyed, shocked appearance.

“What in _Bast’s_ name is going on?”

They retreat to the palace and numbly redo their tasks from the first time everything had reset. The rest of the world has no memory of what happened, reacting exactly as they had the first time. It seemed like the only people that had any memory of exactly what happened were those who had been on the Wakandan battlefield. The weight of that knowledge weighs heavy. All are drawn and quiet as Bruce and Jane work to get their tracers back up, to watch Thanos’s journey back to Earth.

“Loki,” Thor whispers, tugging on his hand. Thor leads him out of the meeting room where they are all assembled, waiting, and into an empty hallway. When they are alone, Thor seizes him, pulling him into a tight embrace. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry-”

Thor keeps whispering the apologies, hiding his face against Loki’s hair. He shakes with sobs, squeezing him tight. Loki still feels numb with shock.

Thor pulls back after a long time, his face wet with tears. He cups Loki’s face between his hands. “I should have believed you.”

Loki laughs and it turns into a sniffle. “That’s what I was going to say.”

Thor kisses his forehead. “I’ll listen this time. And I swear, we’ll make it through this. I promise, we’ll survive.”

“We just have to figure out how.”

“Okay. So. We need a new plan,” Carol says. Everyone has assembled again, like the first time. “Because the…Norns…whatever, clearly didn’t think our plan was working.”

“What did they find so flawed in our plan?” Rhodes asks.

“I mean, we _were_ losing…” Natasha points out.

“But, specifically, I mean. Is there any way for us to ask them?”

Thor shakes his head. “Not that I’m aware of.”

“Unless you’d like to return to the underworld, which we do not have time to do and would have no way of returning from…” Loki furrows his brow. “No. The most we could do would be to conjure a vision. Which is only going to be equally cryptic.”

“Probably impossible at this point,” Strange says.

“Is when they reset time maybe a clue?” Bruce asks. “I was the Hulk, so I don’t super remember...” The Valkyrie, standing next to him, shrugs.

“They reset time only when Wanda was hurt,” Steve says.

Wanda’s brow furrows. “So it _is_ about me destroying the Stones? I have destroyed one before, maybe that is what they want…”

“It took all your power to destroy one,” Strange says. Loki frowns, something piecing itself together in his mind. He thinks about Wanda and her magic, tapping his chin with a finger. “Even with all of us, there’s no hope of destroying them all.”

“And we _would_ have to destroy them all,” Gamora says. “We’ve seen what happens when Thanos has even one Stone.”

“Destroy one and he’ll just bring the others back,” Wanda says.

“There could be, like, a puzzle?” Peter Parker says. “You know like...a logic problem. We have to destroy them in a specific order so he can’t bring them back?”

“This isn’t the SAT, kid.”

“And I don’t think we really have time to work out a puzzle,” Carol says.

“I mean, if we just kill Thanos we might have a bit of a chance…” Rhodes points out.

“Come on, back to this? How are we supposed to kill him when we’ve failed over and over?” Sam says.

“Well, third time’s the charm,” Tony says sarcastically.

Steve runs a hand through his hair. “God, we tried to kill him three times on our own, I don’t know what else we can possibly-”

“Threes,” Loki says faintly. “Everything comes in threes.” The puzzle pieces that had become clearer and clearer as the conversation went on suddenly slot together to reveal the picture. To reveal the ritual the Norns intended. The realization hits him like a bolt of lightning, and the back into him. He can nearly smell the scent of smoke and incense in that cave, see the loom before his eyes. “Yes.”

“Okay, I’ll bite, what comes in threes?” Sam asks.

Loki gets shakily to his feet. “ _Everything._ The Norns are three, all things come in threes, past, present, future. It’s…hard to explain, but it’s common in ritual-”

“The Sanctums protecting Earth were three…connected by lay lines, with one at the center…”

Loki nods frantically. “Yes, exactly. What Thanos has done to the world is _exactly_ like what you speak of. He has created new centers of his power, with new ley lines between them.

“Ley lines?” Steve asks.

Loki ignores him. “That’s what they said - he shattered the distinction between life and death and tipped the universe towards _death._ We must right the balance, use the ley lines both to destroy them and as part of the ritual.”

“A ritual?”

“Three of you have been fundamentally altered by the Stones. Wanda and Captain Danvers were given their powers by them. Gamora,” Their eyes meet across the table. “Became a sacrifice for it.”

“Hang on,” Peter says quickly. “We’re not talking about sacrifice…”

“No, I don’t think so. I think it’s just about bringing three places of death together, dividing our forces in three, each led by one of you, and using that as the basis for the spell.”

“Okay, this actually…sounds like it makes sense?” Sam says. “That might just be the ‘I got trapped in another plane of existence for a while’ thing…but like...this actually sounds plausible. Crazy, but plausible.”

“It makes more sense than just throwing ourselves at him again,” Bucky follows up.

“I agree with Loki. And will act to back up his magical theory. This might be the way to destroy the Stones at once - and for good.”

“And then Thanos’s just a giant purple asshole,” Rocket says. “One who we get to kill finally.”

“Okay, so let’s say I believe this,” Clint says. “What are the three locations?”

“I’m guessing the trees, down on the battlefield,” Sam says. “Where Thanos won, where we were for all that time in the Soul Realm.”

“Vormir, obviously,” Gamora says.

“So there’s Vormir and here, but what’s the third location?” Steve asks.

“Could it be New York?” Tony asks. “Where the first attack happened?”

Strange shakes his head. “The portal was closed. I’m not sure that place is enough to function as a new ley line. It was certainly an old one, with the other Sanctums, but things have been quiet since the others were destroyed.”

“It must be a place of death,” Loki says. “One that’s recent. That’s what these two have in common, aside from just the Stones. They’re places of death…”

“Norway,” Thor says quietly. “The cliffside.”

Loki pauses a moment. “Yes. That would work.” _Remember this place._ Both Odin’s death and Hela’s return would have left their marks on that place. “It is a recent one. One that thinned the boundary between life and death. And we have some connection to it, emotional like that strengthens any ritual.” Loki nods. “That would work.”

“You’re sure?” Steve says. “Because it doesn’t seem like we’re going to get another chance.”

“I am _quite_ certain this time.”

Gamora is nodding. “I think he’s right. I think I have to go back to Vormir.”

“Are you sure?” Peter doesn’t sound pleased at the idea. But they lock eyes and she gives him a faint smile.

“Yes. I’m sure.”

“I’ll stay here, since…” Wanda trails off, then remembers herself. “This is where I killed Vision.”

“Guess I’m coming with you guys to Norway,” Carol says. “I’ve never been. Heard it’s nice.”

“Haven’t been in a millennia or so, but it wasn’t bad for Midgard, if I recall correctly.” The Valkyrie grins.

“Excellent,” Loki says. “Yes. This is the right track.” Others don’t look quite as sure.

“I’m not so sure about trusting magic…” Tony says. Loki stiffens, opens his mouth to protest. “But this one time…I think I can make an exception.”

“You will see, Stark,” Loki says. “And I expect a formal apology when this is all done.”

After so long, hiding in the dark, Loki feels powerful for the first time. A true power, not the panicked, defensive power he’d grasped at a few times since his fall. He feels sure of himself, like he used to when he was a young prince of Asgard, entirely unaware of the horrors lurking on the horizon. He’s sure there will be a crash later, when it all catches back up with him, but for now, the closeness to finally defeating Thanos and being free from this shadow fills him with energy.

Loki feels Thor’s presence behind him, feels his pride and protectiveness through the connection between their magics. He catches the Valkyrie’s gaze. She’s grinning wildly and nods once at him. Loki holds his head high and looks back to Tony.

Tony holds his gaze for a moment, looking affronted. Then he looks down and laughs. “All right. All right.”

T’Challa nods. “Let’s get ready.”

They make their way down to the copse of trees, to the epicenter of it all.

“The air is already thin here,” Strange says with a note of surprise. “I didn’t notice before but now that I know what I’m looking for…” He looks to Loki. “I think you might be right.”

“Don’t sound so surprised.”

“Everyone ready? Good. Let’s go.”

They divide in three groups. Strange makes a circular motion with his hands and portals open, one leading to Norway and the other to Vormir.

“Hey.” Valkyrie claps Peter on the shoulder. “Good luck. I don’t think I could have done it without you.”

“Yeah, you too. Don’t get yourself killed.”

“I’ll try.”

Loki hangs back as their armies pass through the portals. He conjures a ceremonial dagger to his hand, one with a long point, and carves runes into the dirt, whispering the words of the spell to connect their realities. He can hear the drumbeat again, but this time it excites his blood. He can feel the power in it, the coming battle.

Thor and the Valkyrie wait for him at the portal, then follow through as he steps through to Vormir and does the same. This place feels even more of death and power. When he finishes the runes he can feel the same strange energy that he had felt in the hall of the Norns. The others watch him work. Then he steps through to the final place, the cliffside in Norway where Odin had passed on to Valhalla and Hela had emerged from Hel. The air he tastes of familiar seidr, the magic that used to permeate all of Asgard. The fresh wind coming off the sea and for a moment it reminds him so much of home that he expects to turn and see the city’s skyline behind him.

Loki carves the runes and the air seems to ripple. He can feel it all now. The feeling of dust and the beating drum, the existential power of the Norns, the seidr of the cliffside. They’ve folded together the ley lines, connected the three places. Each location exists in the same place, layered over each other. It _is_ like the assaults they have already faced with Thanos - it will just be taking place in three places at once.

“Okay, this is real weird,” Sam says, glancing to his right where Steve stands, still in Wakanda.

“Yeah. Real weird,” Steve agrees.

On Vormir, Nebula raises her head. “It’s time.”

“Is it?” Peter asks. “I don’t see him yet.”

“No,” she says simply. “It is time for Thanos to die. Don’t you feel it?”

“I feel it,” Gamora agrees. “It’s time.”

In Norway, Loki finishes his spell and takes his place in the line. He takes a deep breath. “That’s it. I’ve done all I can.”

“Rest is up to all of us.” Carol claps her hands together and her power sparks. It seems to connect to the magic in the air, dancing with it. “Whoa.”

Thor hefts his axe. “We will not fail this time.”

In Wakanda, Okoye receives a communication from Shuri in the tower.

“He’s across the atmosphere,” she says.

Okoye nods. “It is time.”

“Hold steady!” T’Challa calls out to the troops.

Thanos returns to Wakanda, just as he had the first two times.

He sees them all laid out, the strange rippling magic, and roars again.

“I do not know what magic you are playing with,” Thanos bellows. “But I swear, I will root out every foolish magician and witch you’re hiding and make sure they know the meaning of suffering before I kill them.”

Loki hears blood whooshing in his ears. His confidence falters in the face of Thanos’s rage. The full force of his wrath triggers that well of panic and fear. His breath comes short. Thor’s hand wraps around his wrist, sparks of lightning traveling up Loki’s arm but they don’t hurt.

“We will not fail,” Thor whispers again. “And I will not let him touch you ever again.”

“I’ll cut your throat myself, your highness.”

Loki’s lips twitch. “Thank you, Brunnhilde.”

Carol glances back at them, looking a little disturbed. “Great, let’s not let it come to that, kay?” Sam laughs.

The battle starts again, as it had twice before. It is a dizzying, confusing cyclone of blood and changing landscapes as the battle takes them from one plane to another. Tony and Rhodes take the first blows at Thanos and the Gauntlet, holding him off from using it.

Loki doesn’t give Ebony Maw the chance to invade his mind this time. He feels his presence on the battlefield and knows that he needs to eliminate him quickly before he can work to counteract the magic he’d laid down. He leaves Thor to slaughter the Chitauri with lightning and Stormbreaker, and seeks Maw out. He finds him dueling with Natasha and moves fast, driving one knife into his spine just below the ribs and cutting his throat with a second. Maw drops with barely a sound, spraying arterial blood all over Natasha.

“Gross,” she gasps. “Thanks, he was trying to do something weird to my head.”

“Yes, he does that,” he says tiredly and turns back to the fighting. He barely hopes that Maw is dead for good this time.

The fight continues at a dizzying pace, the three locations blend together. One could fall back from a creature in Wakanda, only to splash into the shallow waters of Vormir, surge back into the battle under the Norwegian sun. It spreads Thanos’s forces thin and confuses them enough that they are thrown off their game. Their

Thanos roars and knocks back everything they throw at him, but something is different. Something is wrong and he knows it this time. At a break in the action he raises the Gauntlet to use it - only to have it reverberate, the power doing nothing but vibrating the Stones in their own mountings.

“No!” Thanos tries again, to the same results.

A jet of golden power strikes the Gauntlet, freezing time for a heartbeat. Thanos turns to strike back but Carol holds her ground. Her whole body glows with golden light, even her eyes. She sends another bolt of power even as he charges her, slipping from Wakanda to Norway.

Loki lunges for him with a long knife, aimed for his throat. Thanos catches it with the power of the Gauntlet, freezing it in place.

“Loki,” Thanos growls. “I know this was your doing. You will pay, you will pay for a long time before I let you die.”

“No,” Loki holds fast to the knife, keeping still. “Not this time.”

Thunder roars and they’re surrounded by sparks of lightning. Thor brings down his axe on Thanos’s back.

He arches back with a strangled cry. The Gauntlet releases Loki’s knife and he falls back.

“I told you,” Thor growls. “You’d pay for that.” Thanos roars and Thor plants a boot against his back and kicks him off the axe. He stumbles onto the waters of Vormir, falling to his knees.

“Hello, Father,” Gamora says. “Welcome back.”

“Gamora.” Thanos staggers to his feet, reaching out a hand. “Daughter.”

“What you’d done is unnatural,” she says. Her hand shakes on the gun in her hand - one of Peter’s. “This is nature, reasserting itself. This is the universe telling you _no.”_ She raises the weapon and fires it straight at the Gauntlet.

The reverberation rings out again like a shock wave. Thanos is too shocked to act when he feels a pressure on his ruined back. Nebula, using his back like a springboard to equalize their heights. With a furious cry, she takes her long knife already soaked with blood and draws a deep cut across his throat, sending blood spurting into the water. The cut goes nearly to the spine. Nebula lands lightly on her feet, turning to watch Thanos stumble backwards, eyes wide with shock.

His gauntleted hand - blackened with damage, the metal flaking and burning his skin, the Stones fast losing their luster - stretches out towards his daughters. The other goes to his neck, quickly becoming soaked with blood. His last sight as he falls through to Wakanda is Gamora and Nebula, looking at him gravely under the dark skies of Vormir.

His dying body hits the ground in Wakanda. He cannot breathe, his blood soaking the Earth. He looks up at the canopy of trees where once he had achieved his ultimate victory. His blood pumps out onto the earth.

“Now!” Steve calls. “Do it, Wanda! Finish it!”

Wanda walks calmly to where Thanos lies bleeding. He lies nearly exactly the same place where Vision died. “You took everything from me.”

Thanos gurgles on the blood in his throat. He’s lasted longer than a human would have, his heart still working to beat the blood out of his sliced arteries. His body twitches, his hand seems to try to close-

Wanda’s scarlet magic swirls in her hands and she sends the full force of it straight onto the Gauntlet.

Time slows. The stream of power glows brighter and brighter.

The Gauntlet explodes.

The concussive wave ripples out, knocking back all of the combatants. There’s a moment of complete darkness, of complete silence. When they recover from the concussive wave, the portals are all closed. Each location is separate again. The battle is over.

“Gamora? Peter” Rocket turns in a circle. “Fuck, where did they go?”

“I have no idea,” Strange, who had ended up in Vormir at the end, says.

“He’s dead.” Nebula keeps on her knees. She tosses back her head and laughs. “He’s dead.”

“Wanda?” Steve calls out.

“She was right there,” Clint says. “What the hell?”

In Norway, they also get gingerly to their feet. “Everyone okay?” Sam calls out. “Wait, we’re missing…”

Carol heaves herself over the side of the cliff, spitting seawater onto the grass. “Ouch. Okay. We did it. Holy shit. Fuck, so the Norns were real, that’s interesting.”

“The Norns?” Tony flips up his visor. “What the hell happened?”

What happened in the final moments of the battle was this:

As Thanos vanished to Vormir, Loki began to understand that it was the beginning of the end. He can feel the power in the air flexing, something building up.

“What now?” the Valkyrie gasps as she kills the last beast.

The Hulk roars. “Thanos dead?”

“Almost,” Loki says, though it doesn’t actually seem real. Thor lands beside him, letting the sparks fade. He looks at the blood on the edge of his axe. “Almost.”

Loki feels the final explosive wave the second before it hits them. He doesn’t even have time to call Thor’s name before they’re knocked back. He thinks he feels them fall against the Valkyrie before everything goes black.

When he comes to, he is underwater. The dark water envelopes them as they sink down into the salty depths. The light recedes. Loki feels Thor’s hand on his arm, looks to his side and sees the Valkyrie and Carol sinking as well. He thinks he should swim, should fight to get back to the surface, but the exhaustion hits him then. Loki is battle weary and sore and can do nothing else but give in to the sinking.

But the moment he gives in to the sinking - so curious, how similar and yet how different it was to falling - Loki is not sinking anymore. He’s not in the water anymore. He’s standing, in a wide open space. The edges are shrouded in darkness.

Thor is beside him, holding onto his arm with a tight grip. The Valkyrie stands on his other side, catching her breath. “Where are we?” Thor says in a whisper.

“I’ve got no idea,” Carol says.

“I do,” says Gamora.

“Yes,” Peter. “Don’t you recognize it?”

“No,” Wanda says. “Does this mean we failed?”

“You did not fail,” the Norns say. The amorphous darkness coalesces into the vast chamber where Loki, Valkyrie, and Peter had followed Gamora and met the Norns. They stand as they did, cloaked in black linen on the dais. The loom stretches up behind them. “You have done well.”

“Okay,” Carol says faintly. “Okay, cool. So you must be the…Norns?”

“Yes,” they hiss together. “We are the Norns, we are fate. In this matter, we represented the interest of the universe itself.”

“Thanks for, uh, resetting time,” Peter says. “Again. But we’re not…we’re not dead, are we?”

They laugh and the sound raises goosebumps on Loki’s skin. Thor inches closer to him.

“No,” they rasp. “Far from dead. You all still have much to do in your lives. Many threads to weave.”

“Then why are we here?” Gamora asks.

“A brief respite. And a reward.”

“Reward?” Wanda asks, suddenly sounding hopeful.

“A question, answered truthfully and plainly. One each, for the three destroyers of the Stones.”

“So…what do we do now?” Carol hesitantly asks first.

“You bear powers given by the Stones, by the universe itself. It is up to you what you do with it, though you should respect the gravity of the gift bestowed upon you.” Carol nods, looking thoughtful.

Gamora sets her jaw and looks up at them. “Is he really dead?”

They laugh again, that eerie rasping laugh. “We believe your sister was quite thorough. You are free. It is time to make your life for yourself. Build your new family, make your retributions on your own terms. Burn the corpse, curse the ashes, split them in three and bury them in a barren field. There you will find a new beginning.”

“Have they been destroyed then? The Stones?” Wanda asks.

The Norns take a long moment to answer. “No. But they are hidden,” The Norns say as one. “Rewoven into the fabric of time, the fabric of matter, throughout the cosmos. Throughout their creation.”

“But someone could find them again,” the Valkyrie says. “Someone just like Thanos. This could all happen again.”

“Not likely, lady,” They rasp. “What you have done is profound. To retrieve them would require equal power, equal coordination throughout space and time. Not impossible, no. But impossible for one. Impossible for another Thanos.”

“Oh, well, good,” Carol says with a tight nod.

“The answer to your _true_ question, Wanda Maximoff, is _no._ He will not be returning. He is dead, his spirit scattered to the winds. That is what happens sometimes, to heroes. There cannot always be happy endings.”

“It just…I have lost _everything._ Over and over and it’s not… _fair._ ”

The Norns consider her for a moment. “No. It’s not. Fate is unfair. It is also fair. There will be time for it to be kind to you once again.” Wanda chews on her lip, looking away.

“Asgardians…” The Norns turn their attention to the three of them. “You’ve been quiet.”

Thor straightens his back, taking a step forward. “What would you have us do?”

“You too have a chance to start over. Do not disappoint us. Asgard is the center of Yggdrasil - let it grow anew. You have the gift of foresight, Witch-King. Use it well. As for you two…”

The Valkyrie stiffens. “As long as I get a break from seers. Well, that one seer in particular.”

“No. Not for a long time. Your wish is granted. As long as you stop running. Though, I believe the crow will rather miss you.”

She scoffs. “Too bad. I’m not running anymore.”

“And you, prince.”

Loki’s gaze remains steady. “And what will you command of me, fates?”

“We have no command of you. We cannot command you, any more than we can command the wind, or the seas, or the magic in your veins. But remember, you are free from the darkness. Do not let it consume you.” Their gauzy cloaks shift in a wind that none of them can feel. “It is time for you to go home.”

And then Loki blinks his eyes open, on his back. There are white clouds floating across a blue sky. He coughs, expelling seawater from his lungs.

Thor’s hand is on his chest.

“Are you alright?” he croaks, also soaking wet, also coughing up water. On Loki’s other side, the Valkyrie groans, spitting. Wanda, Carol, and Gamora are nowhere to be seen.

“I hope I never see that damned place again,” she says. They get to their feet, helping each other up.

“But where are we now?” Loki asks, turning in a circle. They are on an island. An empty island, with a rocky coastline and tall grasses. Three others stretch towards the setting sun. None of their comrades are anywhere to be seen.

“I have no idea.” Valkyrie responds.

_Home,_ it seems a voice whispers in all of their ears. Thor turns again and in the distance sees a rocky coastline. “Remember this place,” he murmurs to himself. “Home.”

“Brother?”

“I think,” Thor clears his throat. “I think we’re home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not even sure what to say here. I have a lot of weird and conflicting feelings about posting this last full chapter. This has been a lot of work, for almost two years at this point. I don't think I've ever worked on a fic this hard before. I bought 2 books, did 2 full drafts, write it for almost a year. 
> 
> I'm sure there are still hanging plot questions. ( _Magic_ , will be the answer to most of those.) I'm sure that not all characters got the full endings they deserve. (Big casts are _hard_.) But I did my best and I'm really happy with my little series! <3 I hope you are too! Thank you all for sticking with me the past two years, for your patience in waiting for me to be really satisfied with this installment, and for all the encouragement and engagement you've poured in during posting this summer!
> 
> I don't think I'm quite done with this AU quite yet. I can't make any promises, because, well, look what happened the last time I said 'I think it will be done soon!' (Whenever I'd go back to something in 'bound at the end of the world' I'd see the last author's note that was like 'hoping to start posting soon!' and I lol at myself and my optimism.) I have plans for at least one more longer fic, and a shorter one that is actually more or less close to a draft, so I'll be back (probably). And of course, I'll be posting the real final chapter, a relatively short epilogue, on Sunday. 
> 
> I stopped putting this because I figured you all were tired of hearing it, but if you want updates/general life shenanigans feel free to follow me on [tumblr @bereft-of-frogs.](https://bereft-of-frogs.tumblr.com/) (Or just subscribe to the series on AO3 that's fine too. XD)
> 
> On Sunday: the epilogue; building something new. [Plus: references and acknowledgments!]


	11. Epilogue: Something New

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For once, the future looks bright.

_“For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”_

-JRR Tolkien, _The Return of the King_

“…the mysterious incident has caused some unrest across the globe. The crisis appears to have passed, but authorities are still refusing to speak about the specifics. Power outages, plane crashes, drivers reporting being suddenly distracted and unable to control their vehicles, mysterious damage appearing where none had been a moment before…”

“…there has been some serious property damage, including evidence of serious fighting in a few areas, but relatively few fatalities. Some have credited the Avengers and their allies with preventing further destruction, but so far they have been mum on the details…”

“…the governor said today that he expects the electrical grid to be up by Friday, and volunteers are hard at work clearing rubble from the I-95, which is currently only open to official vehicles…”

“…conspiracy theories are already running rampant, with some claiming that they remember several days, up to a week at least, passing between one second and the next, and while their stories are bizarre, they are remarkably consistent…”

“…the king is just very happy that order is returning, reassures the world that the incident in Wakanda was isolated and contained, and they hope that they can continue the outreach work that has begun…”

“…there has been no comment from the State Department, and Secretary Ross declined to be interviewed, saying he would comment only when a new deal was reached. Negotiations are not expected to begin again until the cleanup efforts are further underway and alert levels have been lowered…”

“…we are still waiting to hear from the other Avengers, but Tony Stark has been taking up the media slack. He and fiancée Pepper Potts held a press conference and teased at a possible special appearance on _60 Minutes_. They did not confirm a date for what’s sure to be the wedding of the century, but assured us they would keep the public informed of their plans. ‘Everyone’s invited! Come on, Pepper, we can invite everyone, can’t we?’ Mr. Stark has pledged funds to help anyone affected by the mysterious blip. Colonel Rhodes has also issued a statement, on behalf…”

“Having fun?”

“You know, there’s nothing like a little bit of manual labor to get your head on straight.”

“You did good.”

Natasha stands up, setting aside the power drill. She cocks her head at the door she’d been re-hanging; the side entrance to the Avengers’ facility in upstate New York. “Did I? It still looks kind of crooked.”

Fury grins. “Okay, maybe you’re no master carpenter.”

They walk together through the (slightly crooked) door to the main atrium and Natasha grabs her water bottle from where she left it on the bench.

“I’m serious, you did good, Nat. You all did. I’m honestly pretty impressed you didn’t all kill each other.”

“I think you’re kind of undercutting the compliment, Nick.” Carol calls from the doorway. “Ready to go?”

Fury pats Natasha’s shoulders. “I’m proud of you all, Natasha. Really. You and Rogers…you held this place together. Entirely without my assistance, I might add. And I think you’ll do very well around here.”

“You sure you don’t want to stick around?”

“We’ve got a dinner date. And then Carol and I are going to spend some time making sure the rest of the galaxy is recovering as nicely as Earth. Especially since it seems that the Guardians of the Galaxy are planning on being Earth-bound for a while. Good luck, Natasha. You know how to reach me.”

“Come on, Nick, Maria’s making tacos and we’re supposed to pick up Monica on the way!”

He slings his duffel bag over his shoulder. “I’ll see you all later,” He gives her a little wave as he heads towards the door.

“Yeah, see you later, _Nick._ ”

Fury stops. “Okay, fine. You save the universe, _you_ get to call me Nick. Don’t,” He points his finger at her in warning. “Encourage the others. Call me if you need me. Try to keep them all in line.”

“Will do.” Then he and Carol are out the door.

Maria Hill, from Natasha’s other side, clears her throat. She tucks her clipboard under her arm. “So. What’s next?”

Natasha smiles. “I think we should probably finish fixing that door.”

Several miles away, Gamora is studying Peter intently. “Are you _really_ sure about this, Peter?”

“I’m sure,” He says gravely. “It’s just…something I’ve gotta do.”

“Peter.” Gamora levels him with a look. “You know that is not what I’m talking about.”

“Come on! How hard could it be?” He flexes his hands on the steering wheel. “I fly a _spaceship,_ Gamora, and I’m a _damn_ good pilot, thank you very much.”

“I am just saying that you left this planet when you were a child, and that other Peter said that the age to learn to drive a car was much higher than when you-”

“I can _totally_ do it, Gamora. I can drive a goddamn car.” Peter puts the car in drive and lifts his foot from the brake. They start to roll forward and he hits the gas. They accelerate a _little_ faster than he had intended and he slams back onto the brake. Gamora gives him a look. “It’s fine.” He eases back off the brake and they start driving much more smoothly than the first time. “See?”

She rolls her eyes with a sigh. “Just _drive_ , Peter.”

They pull onto the I-70 west and head out towards the setting sun.

“I’m sure you’re wondering why I gathered you here,” Steve says formally.

“Well, yeah, I feel like that fucking text was a little like getting summoned to the principal’s office. You have any idea what this is about, Barnes?”

“Not a clue,” Bucky says, but he’s looking at Steve with a gleam in his eye that suggests he does, indeed, have a clue.

“Have a seat,” Steve says and they settle themselves on the other side of the picnic table, feeling very much like they’re sitting down across the principal’s desk, or the kitchen table of a very disappointed parent. “So it might come as no surprise that I’m intending on taking a little bit of a break. An…early retirement, let’s say. I’m not saying I’d never come back but, well, it’s been a rough few years and I think I’d like to spend some being of service to my community…without spending so much of that time fighting aliens.”

Sam laughs. “That’s fair. Thanks for letting us know before the official announcement. I’m assuming you’re going to want us to plan your retirement party. Just a warning - it’s going to be _terrible_. I’m going to lean _hard_ into the ‘old man Rogers’ theme. It’s going to be at 4pm, there is going to be jello, and SPAM, and shuffleboard-”

“Sam, I want you to take over.” Steve reaches under the table and sets the shield on the surface. He’d gotten it back from Tony in the heady aftermath of their victory. There had been days worth of debriefings and there was still a lot up in the air, especially concerning the technical point that he might have committed light treason - but when he returned to his hotel room one night he found the shield, and a note. _It’s yours. You deserve it._ The shield was officially his to do what he wanted with. And he wanted to give it to Sam.

“You were there for me when nearly everyone else wanted me dead. Literally. You were the one helping me root out Hydra, helping me look for Bucky, helping me break into the goddamned Raft. I’ve heard what the two of you did, when you got dusted. You were a real leader in there, Sam. It’s high time for me to pass along this whole Captain America thing, and there’s no one else I’d want it to go to.”

Sam just looks at the shield with his mouth hanging opening, running his fingers over the vibranium surface. Steve and Bucky share an amused look.

“Besides,” Bucky says. “If I’m going to go straight, I’m going to need someone to keep me on my best behavior. Think you’re up to the challenge, Wilson?”

“Oh, I think I can take you, Barnes,” Sam says faintly, with a smile dawning on his face.

“We have a much bigger challenge on our hands.” Steve lays a newspaper out on the table. He pauses for dramatic effect. “We need an affordable 3 bedroom in Brooklyn.”

“Steve, you can’t find an apartment in a _newspaper_ anymore, Jesus Christ, come on, let’s go back to the office, we’ll use a damn computer, like it’s not _1945_ , damn-”

The cab pulls up to the curb and Wanda pays the driver. Carefully stowing the book she’d been reading under her arm, she retrieves her suitcase from the trunk and looks up at the nondescript building. As she watches, the features of the building reveal themselves, transforming the plain and unassuming brick building into a four story stone edifice, with a rooftop garden and a large, round front window.

Wanda ascends the steps of the Sanctum, suitcase in hand and Loki’s spellbook tucked under her arm.

The waves crash on the rocks below. The day is sunny and clear, the breeze a cool and clean balm. Here, at the edge of the sea, it feels like nothing has happened at all. No devastation, no destruction. Just peace and the movements of the tides and air currents and blades of grass. It is almost as if nothing had changed since they had first stood on this cliffside and watched their father fade into glimmering sparks of power and drift away. If one looked closer, they might be able to see the scourges in the earth from the battle, but a couple weeks of summer growth had covered up the scars quickly. 

Across the sea, right where Odin vanished into the wind, lies a brand new cluster of islands. From this distance it is difficult to see details, but they are clearly full of frenetic, excited energy. A collection of wood structures are slowly rising from the land. Asgard, born again on a small archipelago off the coast of Norway. Conjured by the Norns, a complete mystery to the nearby humans. They were adjusting well, all things considered. The sudden influx of construction jobs (funded entirely by Stark Industries) had gone a long way in smoothing relations.

“Construction is proceeding well,” Loki remarks. “It’s no golden tower but…”

“It will do,” Thor finishes with a smile. “New Asgard. Born again.”

“Like everything else.” Loki’s skin still feels somewhat odd, stretched, but even that is getting better. His mind and his magic is a bigger project, especially where it is still too entwined with his brothers. Loki is still processes that Thanos has been defeated, that he no longer has to live with that shadow of fear. He does need to learn how to live with the trauma, how to accept what has happened in the past and not let it shape him. But that will all improve with time too. “It will take a long time for things to return to normal.”

“But they will. I think we can make it work, brother. We can make this our home.”

“It certainly will be more comfortable than that cramped spaceship,” _and that had felt like home._ The thought goes without saying. Said cramped spaceship will arrive in two weeks with the remains of their people and Heimdall at the helm.

“Far better. And with a blessing from the Norns, I think we can do quite well for ourselves.”

“Ready to go, highnesses?” The Valkyrie joins them on the cliffside. “Bruce says he’ll be along with the later ferry, he’s still sorting the radio and internet equipment they’re sending to us. So this is it.” She loops her arm through Loki’s. “I like it. It’s nice here.”

“Let’s go then,” Thor says. “They’ll be expecting us.”

They hike down the cliff to the small wharf to the waiting ferry and cross the choppy seas to the future.

_The End._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So that's it! Obviously, there are some unanswered questions, some complications that haven't (yet) been solved, but Thanos is dead and the universe rejoices. I did leave some things sort of mysterious as well, especially regarding the affect of the apocalypse on the 'actual/real' present; I was aiming for like...that it didn't just perfectly magically fix everything. (Part of the reason why it can't be a solution to every problem. So, even if the Norns were willing to reset time for every calamity, in a lot of cases it wouldn't actually be worth it. We'll save that for the 'destroying the fabric of reality' level events.) So some of the damage of each recurring time reset bleeds through onto the 'current' timeline. Time is weird! I really wanted to lean sort of heavily into the 'resetting time is bizarre and also has consequences.' I realized I maybe could have done a better job explaining this part. There are plenty of other mysterious things, that our characters may never understand. But they've gotten through the fire, and for once, the future looks bright. :-)
> 
> I know this installment hasn't had quite as much emotional catharsis/comfort as the others. This was really dedicated to getting through the plot. Finally killing Thanos and saving the universe. I may or may not come back for some smaller, heavy-on-the-comfort fics, I can't make too many promises. ;-) But I will say I have a couple ideas. ;-) And, a reminder since half the point of this series is it being out of order, there are a couple fics in my last year [whumptober collection](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21136151/chapters/50299583) that take place _after_ this fic. So you can check those out in the meantime!
> 
> * * *
> 
> References: 
> 
> 1\. Title Reference: ['Marius Alone Amid the Ruins of Carthage' (1832)](https://www.albanyinstitute.org/details/items/marius-amid-the-ruins-of-carthage.html) by John Vanderlyn (1775-1852) (This was part of a conference paper I presented, and it stuck with me.)
> 
> 2\. If you've been following on tumblr, the banner image is: ['Die Nornen' (1889)](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Die_Nornen_\(1889\)_by_Johannes_Gehrts.jpg) by Johannes Gehrts (1855-1921)
> 
> 3\. A lot of the apocalypse details, including the description of the water pumps failing and the subways under New York flooding in 8. Collapse, came from Alan Weisman's _The World Without Us._
> 
> 4\. Norn inspiration was from Karen Bek-Pedersen's _The Norns in Old Norse Mythology_
> 
> 5\. Other inspiration came from _Station Eleven_ by Emily St. John-Mandel and _American Gods_ by Neil Gaiman. These two are less direct, but when I went into the rewrite I set these two as like....#VibeGoals for the two split narratives. 
> 
> _I'm sure I'm missing something. If you're interested/curious about something that looks like a reference to something, leave a comment and I'll get back to you!_
> 
> Acknowledgements
> 
> This is going to be a sort of strange acknowledgement section, because most people on the list will probably never see this. First off, my two friends who we'll refer to as D--- and S---. One of whom has seen every MCU movie with me in theaters since _Black Panther_ , including _Endgame_ and shared a lot of my frustrations. The other recommended _The World Without Us_ and then actually _found_ a copy of it at a library book sale we went to one weekend last summer. The three of us ended up having a bunch of weird conversations about the apocalypse and the various was a 50% reduction several weekends with coffee and brunch. They were super helpful in the early brainstorming stages and influential in how my depiction of an extreme population decline apocalypse turned out. 
> 
> Also, thanks to my brother who went to most of the MCU movies with me pre- _Black Panther_ (before I moved away), and who is way more keyed in to all the theories, comics references, future storylines, etc, and supplied me with the 'they're trapped in the Soul Stone/Soul Realm' theory the day after he saw _Infinity War_ in 2018.
> 
> I'm not going to get specific here, because I know I'll leave someone out, but super special thanks to everyone on tumblr who has liked/commented on the in-progress stuff, or my general #writingproblems posts. I 100% sometimes refer to you guys as 'oh yeah my friends who don't live here......' And last but not least, everyone who has stuck with this series, or just joined in! Everyone who commented/kudos'd/or just read silently, I appreciate you! <3


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